Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

Case of the Laughing Virgin by Jonathan Craig

From the body on the floor to the body in the film strip, the case seemed to grow hotter at every step, even as the trail seemed to be growing colder — and then Selby learned a very strange thing...

I

The naked girl on the roof was no longer screaming. But she was trying to. She stood just back of the foot-high parapet, head thrown back and fists clenched hard against her bare thighs, her whole body rigid with terror as she tried to force the frozen scream past her throat.

She was a silver blonde, with long, tapering legs, a tiny waist, and the kind of pointed, upthrust breasts that meant she was probably still in her teens.

I opened the kiosk door a little wider, stepped out onto the roof, and motioned to my detective partner, Stan Rayder, to circle around her, just in case. The alarm that had brought us barreling halfway across Greenwich Village to this three-story brownstone on Bleecker Street had said the girl was a jumper.

Although I myself didn’t make her for one — still, you can never be sure. The difference between a jumper and a non-jumper can sometimes be as little as an unexpected noise or a sudden movement.

She’d heard us. Slowly her chin came down, and then with short, jerky movement’s of her head, she turned to face us. But she didn’t really see us, I knew; she was looking through us and beyond us.

I took a single slow step toward her, paused for a moment, and took another. The girl didn’t move. She stared at me unblinkingly, and even when Stan Rayder started off at an angle that would bring him up behind her, her eyes stayed on me.

With Stan already in motion, there was no point in hesitating any longer. I tried to work up the kind of big, friendly, reassuring smile that seemed to be called for, took a deep breath, and walked across the asphalt toward her, as casually as if approaching a naked girl on a rooftop at high noon were something a man did every day of his life.

We almost lost her. With about ten feet remaining between us, her eyelids fluttered and her rigid, quivering body sagged abruptly. If we’d been only another foot apart, and if I hadn’t been a fairly fast man on my feet, she’d have toppled over the parapet and ended up on the pavement three floors below.

Even so, it was much too close. At the same instant I grabbed her, I felt my left ankle turn a little, and for a very long and very bad moment I found myself looking straight down into the upturned faces of the crowd beneath us on the sidewalk.

It couldn’t have lasted longer than a second or so, but it was long enough to chill the film of sweat along my ribs and across my back. By the time I’d recovered my balance and carried the girl a few steps away from the parapet, my heart was slugging away like an air hammer.

“A close one, Pete,” Stan Rayder said softly as he came up to us. “I thought you’d had it.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “Only the good die young, Stan.”

“Very pretty,” he said, studying the unconscious girl as I shifted her around to a more comfortable position in my arms. “And she smells pretty, too. Offhand, I’d say it was a blend of Chanel Number Five and Vat Sixty-nine.”

“That’s bad?” I asked.

He grinned and fell into step beside me as I started back across the roof to the kiosk. Stan’s a deceptively thin, deceptively mild, studious-looking young cop with a little premature silver in his crewcut, a look of perpetual surprise in his gray eyes, and a bomb in both fists.

“I was just making a clinical observation,” he said. “And besides, on this girl, even kerosene would smell good.”

“Let’s keep it clinical,” I said. “And while you’re resting, how about opening that door a little wider?”

He pushed the kiosk door all the way open, stood aside while I carried the girl through it, and followed me down the steep, narrow stairway to the third-floor corridor.

“Now to find out where she came from,” Stan said as I lowered the girl to the floor. “Which reminds me — I wonder where all the gawkers are? You’d think every tenant in the house would be up here by now.”

I took off my jacket, spread it over as much of the girl as it would cover, and turned to look down the dimly-lit corridor. “Maybe they’re scared,” I said.

“Scared? Scared of what?”

“Maybe of the same thing that scared our girl here.”

He glanced at her, and then bent down on one knee to peer at her face more closely.

“She was moving her eyelids a little,” he said. “I think she might be coming out of it.”

There was a half-open door about three quarters of the way down the hall. “Stay here with her, Stan,” I said. “I want to see what’s on the other side of that door there.”