Chapter one:

Girl with eye patch

On percentage, I should have figured that pillow slip would turn out to be the fuse to a case full of dynamite. Nine times out of ten the real trouble in any hotel breaks just before the security chief is supposed to go off duty. This call came through at five to eight. I was practically on my way over to the Garden to catch the bantamweight prelims. I should have known.

But it had been a quiet night. Nothing more exciting than putting the grip on a pair of wallet workers who’d been smiting the pre-theater crowd hip and thigh until we placed them under genteel restraint. So when Zingy flagged me, I took for granted it would be merely too much alcohilarity on the sixth where a bunch of tycoons were tuning up for a banquet. Matter requiring tact but not much time, probably.

From across the lobby at the bell desk, Zingy — our jockey-sized bell captain on the night side — gave me the P sign, thumb and index fingers circled against the other outstretched forefinger, and followed it with a sweeping gesture of the palm horizontal like an umpire calling a man safe on base. One of the staff wanted me. That shouldn’t hold me up long, I figured.

Walking to the house phones, I kept my eyes on the couple who’d attracted my attention just before Zingy began his deaf-mute signals. Sandy-haired man about thirty-five; solidly put together; stocky but not fleshy; short, wide face with prominent cheekbones, broad nostrils and a thin, prissy mouth; he looked like the sort of gent who’d call every bellman Mac and every porter George.

His tux was a mite too large for him. I’d never have given it another thought if he’d been too big for his coat. Lots of bulgy burghers outgrow their tailor-mades.

But though this lad was already big, he’d need four more inches around the short ribs before he caught up with that jacket. Trifling thing? Sure. But a rented tux, paraded alongside the sleek custom jobs ordinarily circulating around our plushery, stands out like a beard on a room clerk.

Nothing wrong about hiring a pair of satin lapels, to be sure. Only — the kind of customers who can afford our Plaza Royale prices usually don’t have to rent dinner clothes. Then too, this joe matched up with his companion about like melted margarine with some of Sandor’s champignons. She was a thing.

Maybe it was the way that tall, silver comb set off her black hair in regular tourist-ad señorita style. Or the lacy, black shawl-thing over her otherwise bare shoulders and white dinner gown. Anyhow the effect was Spanish enough to make me think of clicking castanets and the thrum of guitars and high heels stamping out the final bars of a samba. What I could see of her face helped the idea along; she was young and pretty in spite of the white patch covering her right eye.

Perhaps that disfiguring patch accounted for her being so gidgety. She kept glancing around nervously, twisting her head this way and that, clutching her escort’s arm as if she was afraid he’d get away from her. Which he might have been trying to do, from what I could see of his actions.

There’d only been the two of them in the elevator when it let them out at the lobby level. Prissy-mouth had stalked out ahead of her, then turned as if suddenly remembering his manners and made a grab for her. She shook his hand off irritably, spoke crossly to him, and tucked her hand inside his arm, as they came toward the Fifth Avenue entrance. All the way across the lobby, he’d kept half a stride ahead, practically dragging her behind him. Queer pair.

It’s no part of the security office’s job to oversee who twos around with who. But something about this guy made me think of various unpleasantries a few of our femme guests had experienced after hiring an escort from one of the bureaus that make a business of that sort of thing. I made a mental note to check up on the elegant eyeful, and picked up the phone to ask if somebody wanted Mister Vine.

“Mrs. Munster does, Mister V.” The switchboard gal connected me with the head housekeeper.

“Want me, Ada?”

“I’ve got a pillow slip, Mister Vine. I wish you’d come up and look at it.” Ada Munster sounded fretful and worried, but then anybody who has to supervise two hundred floor maids is likely to sound that way.

“In the morning, okay?” I wouldn’t miss more than one of the preliminary bouts, if I could get going right away.

“I do think you’d better see it tonight. It’s got oil on it.”

That didn’t sound good. Ada wouldn’t have called about hair oil.

“And there’s — something else.” She didn’t want to talk with the switchboard girl listening. They always do on security calls. By request.

“What room, Ada?”

“Suite Twenty-One Em Em, Mister V. But I’m in my office.”

“I’ll be up.” I kissed the bantam bouts good-by, wondered if I’d make it in time for the middleweights.

When I went around behind the main desk to go back into the board room, Reidy Duman, our silky-suave assistant manager, asked if I hadn’t planned to go to the fights.

I said I’d be going directly. Meanwhile, what did he know about deluxe duplex 21MM?

He came around back of the registration board with me, looked over my shoulder at the card I took out of the rack.

It said that Teresa Marino (Miss) and maid, from Dallas, Texas, had checked in Monday, July ninth, at a daily rate of $75.00. Evidently a gal who could afford her morning corn flakes at a dime a flake, if she so wished. There were a couple of significant notations. Beside Length of Stay was typed 3–4 w. Under Credit was the Est. which meant our cashier’s department had established her financial standing to its satisfaction. Under Previous Guest History was a cryptic?. Meaning that there weren’t any records of her preference in hard or soft pillows, things like that.

“Oh, oh! That one!” Reidy touched finger tips to lips, blew a kiss to the filing-cabinets. “Something spesh. Here for eye treatment. Wears a patch—”

I said I’d seen her. And wondered why I hadn’t noticed her around the lobby or the dining-room or the elevators in the five days she’d been here. “Like to look at her bill, Reidy.”

He got it from the 20-2400 cashier. It didn’t tell much except that in the hundred-odd hours since checking in, Miss T. Marino and maid had spent a nice snug total of $311.40 for Restaurant and Bar. Also that she had quite a flock of clothes and wasn’t backward about sending them to the cleaners in large batches.

Further, that she had a loose hand with a telephone, both local and L.D. There were quite a lot of the long-line charges. None of them were to Dallas. Or any place in Texas. There were six to Lexington, Kentucky. One for each day. One extra for Saturday.

Reidy cocked a canny eye at me. “Something?”

“Thing that killed the cat, that’s all. Saw her few minutes ago with a lad who didn’t seem in her handicap division. Always thinking of the guests’ welfare. See framed motto.”

He wasn’t fooled. “Want me to put her on the Watch List?”

“I’ll do it if it’s necessary.” Reidy’s a right boy, but like all assistant managers, suffers from the illusion he can boss the security office around. “You skin your own snakes.”

“Hope you lose every bet at the Garden.” He grinned.

I went out to see Pete Zingara.

“Miss Marino? Zounds and gadzooks!” Zingy did a soft-shoe break beside the bell desk. “Halfies all the time. Never less than halfies. Sometimes she gives with the buck, on drugstore errands. For headache powders, stuff from the prescription, like that.”

“Order much of that, does she?” Only customer I hate more’n a glass-smashing drunk is one of those sleeping-pill beauties. If she was one.

“Nah, not so much.” He saw I was serious. “She’s swell folks. Owns a flock of oil wells or something. But nice and quiet, I mean. Real friendly. And that maid of hers — whoo-deedoo!”

“Ever notice one particular friend of hers?” I described the joe in the oversized tux.

“I know ’m.” He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger; Zingy’s quite a buster with that sign language; maybe he has Indian blood in him. “I hear he’s been hangin’ around heavy, I saw him there one mornin’ when I was double-dutying, and even then he was dipping into the clear broth of bourbon, but not in his pocket. Lets her put out with all the cash. But,” he held up a palm, traffic-cop style, “I never hear he’s making like love in bloom. You ask me, Mister V.—”

“I’m asking.”

“He’s not her joy friend; he’s strictly for biz. I wouldn’t know what the deal is, but—”

“But from here in, you’ll keep your ears fanned out. Swell. Do so.” I went upstairs to the head housekeeper’s office.

Ada Munster’s a sad-faced, stringy-haired, skinny old gal with an eighteen-carat heart and a full quota of savvy about human nature. She’d have to have the savvy, after being in charge of twelve hundred bedrooms for three hundred and sixty-five nights a year, ten years. Be surprised some of the peculiar things you learn about people, making up bedrooms.

“I didn’t want to bother you.” She hauled a pillow slip out of a paper laundry bag on a chair beside her desk. “It’s not enough, we have to salvage linens after all the lipstick smears and even tallow,” she pointed to a turquoise nylon spread with little dime-sized discs of wax on it, “but oil!”

I smelled. Light machine oil. “You said there was something else?”

She turned the slip over, pointed to fine, sandy hair-clippings about an eighth of an inch long, embedded in the percale. “She has black hair, Mister Vine. Her maid has black, too.”

“Thanks, Ada.” There’s no law against sleeping with a revolver under your pillow, though it puts a guest on the Watch List and keeps him there. But we do have rules about unregistered males in the beds of female guests. Those hairs were from a freshly barbered he. Miss Marino’s sandy-haired escort, down in the lobby, had been well-groomed. “I’ll check on it, Ada. Anything else?”

“Well—” she looked unhappy, “we don’t wish to complain about guests who can afford that kind of suite. But the maids say they never can get in either of the bedrooms until late in the afternoon, sometimes, as tonight, not before four-thirty. That makes it hard for us, with so many rooms to rack up, and really it is quite unusual for a lady to want to be in her suite all day with the beds unmade! Don’t you think?”

I did think. “Where’s the maid who had sense enough to spot that gun stain?”

“Elsie Dowd? Mrs. Dowd’s still up on the twenty-first. I can call her—”

“Never mind. I’ll go up. Tell her she rates an extra day’s vacation pay. Thanks a lot, Ada.”

Elsie was checking off soap and tissue on her stock list beside the 2100 linen closet.

“I hope I didn’t make any trouble for Miss Marino, Mister Vine.” Elsie was fiftyish and sallow-eyed; she was a little frightened. “She’s been real nice to me, personally.”

“Tips you? All that?”

“Oh, most of them do. But Miss Marino makes you feel she’s interested in you. She’s so sweet. But it’s these men—”

“Plural?”

“Understand, I’m not suggesting anything wrong.” She was uneasy. “But there are generally a couple of men around. There’s one in her suite right now—”

“Probably her cousins.” I gave her a reassuring shoulder pat. “Think no more about it.”

I thought about it. No hotel likes a male patron who invites women up to his suite, particularly in the evening. But any good house would rather have a dozen like such than one woman who attracts men to her suite. That’s bad. For business, I mean.

I knocked at the 21MM living-room door.

No answer.

I rattled keys.

A gruff bass voice: “Who you want?”

“This the house officer.”

“Miss Marino’s not here.”

“Open the door.”

“Hell I will.” He sounded tough.

“You’re not registered in this suite.” I raised my voice so Elsie would hear me and come along the corridor. “Open up, or I will.”

“Try it!” he growled. “You’ll damn well wish you hadn’t.”

In my book there’s only one thing to do in a case like that.

So I did it.

Chapter two:

Streak of blood

Ordinarily, I’d never have walked in on him, cold like that. Not after a warning. Especially not after learning some party’d been snoozing with a persuader under his pillow!

Thing would have been for me to stay out there in the corridor, watch all three of the suite’s doors, and send Elsie to phone for Duman. Then we’d have had two witnesses to any action which might lead to a suit against the hotel.

But this seemed to be an emergency. The guest was out. Somebody else was in her suite. If the guy was there with her permission, still I’d be entitled to look into this free-wheeling pretty who entertained her men friends in our bedrooms.

So I used my master key, gave the door a push, stepped back fast enough to make it tough for him to get a snap shot at me, but not so sudden he couldn’t see me.

Fifteen steps farther along was the door to the suite’s east bedroom. I got to it, quick and quiet. While I was unlocking it, I called to Elsie, loud enough to cover the click of the latch, “Phone Mister Duman, ask him to hustle up.”

I went in, catfoot. The twins were made up. The spreads weren’t mussed. No men’s clothes around. No male brushes or such on the bureau. Only a trace of parfum de panatella. From a ten-cent cigar, if I’m any judge.

The door to the long living-room was half open. Through it I could see the back of a white linen suit. The man was close to the door of the bedroom on my side. I was only ten feet away when I saw him. His left elbow leaned on the bulgy-eyed television set all those double-letter suites are equipped with. Shielded by the cabinet, his right hand hung down so the automatic he held would be hidden from anyone coming in from the corridor to the living-room.

All I could see was that narrow-shouldered but nicely tailored back, the thick and well-tanned neck. And the gun.

He was concentrating on that door so it was no trick to come up behind, grab his wrist before he heard me.

He didn’t battle. Just used one explosive obscenity, then kept still, vocally and otherwise.

While I was prying the gun out of his paw I started to make a crack about house rules forbidding the brandishing of weapons. But when he twisted around so I got a look at his face — I didn’t bother to finish. I was more astonished than he’d been.

He didn’t recognize me; least he didn’t know who I was; he might have noticed me around the lobby. But the tenseness didn’t go out of those smooth, freshly barbered college-boy features which contrasted so handsomely with the curly white hair. That hair was by way of being his trade-mark, so thick and tight it might have been a wig carved out of marble. It really did have the polished look of marble.

I’d have known him, of course, even if he hadn’t been a spectacularly splurgish patron of the Plaza Royale. Even with his ten-dollar cravat a bit on the bias and his brown-agate eyes squinting with alarm, he could have marched smack off the front cover of that weekly which had run his portrait in color, week or so ago. All he needed was that background the mag had used as a frame for his picture — the horn of plenty spewing out a cornucopian flood of slick convertibles, summer cottages, shiny refrigerators, outboard motors, movie projectors, washing machines, all showered round with coins of the realm. Yair, sure. Dow Lanerd.

I laid the automatic on the coffee table beside a silver bowl with yellow lilies floating on water. “Maid reported a man in this suite, Mister Lanerd.” I knew the sandy hair-clippings hadn’t come from his cranium. He wouldn’t have been smoking cheap stogies in this social-register atmosphere.

“Naturally I’m here by invitation.” He kept his face toward the corridor door. “What right have you to force your way in here, Mister—”

“Vine. Gilbert Vine. All the right in the world. If we learned that some unauthorized individual was prowling your suite, you’d expect us to investigate. Why object to letting a house officer in here?”

“Didn’t believe you were — an officer.” He sauntered to the coffee table, waited a second to find out if I’d say, ‘Mustn’t touch!’ When I didn’t, he picked up the automatic, slid it in his pocket, kept his hand there. But he wasn’t watching me; whatever danger he anticipated would evidently come from the corridor.

“Realize you have a job to do, Vine. Only I’m not exactly unauthorized. I’m registered here. My rooms happen to be just across the corridor — and since I had business to discuss with Miss Marino, I came across for a chat. Then she had to leave, asked me to wait until she returned.”

I let him see I didn’t buy it. “Didn’t look to me as if you were waiting for a lady.”

He gave out with one of the famed Lanerd boyish grins — a small-boy grin, partly sheepish, partly mischievous. Hard to dislike a man with a grin like that. “What’d be your reaction, if you’d been in a pretty girl’s apartment, suddenly a gruff voice demanded immediate entrance?”

“Worried about her husband?” I knew it hadn’t been that. If he’d feared what the tabs call a Jealous Mate, he’d have done what any other man would do — scramoose through one of the bedrooms, out to the corridor.

“She’s not married.” He approached the door, hesitated, peered down the corridor toward the elevators, twisted around to look in the opposite direction, came back in, shut the door. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if she had some close friend. Be easy to misconstrue the reason for my being here.”

“It certainly would have. When’ll Miss Marino be back?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“No?” That burned me. For him to think I could be dumb enough to believe she’d ask this hundred-thousand-a-year biggie to hang around her hotel room until her indefinite return. Or that he’d remain, on any such vague basis. “Where’d she go?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“Know who she went with?” From the door of the west bedroom, I gave it the quick runover. Lingerie on one boudoir chair. Mules and nylons on the floor beside it. Gold brush and mirror on the dresser alongside a flock of crystal bottles, lacquered jars.

“Some friend.” Lanerd kept that winning smile on his face. “Wouldn’t it be better if you asked her, when she gets back?”

“I’ve known occasions when an early question saved a lot of trouble later. F’rinst—” I pointed to dark marks on the pile of the chartreuse broadloom, curving in a crazy parabola toward the door from the bedroom to the corridor, “why did somebody feel it necessary to move the bureau against her door? That was done after the maid vacuumed in here.”

Lanerd chuckled, a forced chuckle. “Some women never can stay in any place without shifting the furniture to see how it’ll look in a different arrangement. ‘Now, if the beds were only catercorner instead of straight against the wall,’ or ‘How would it be if—’”

“—we stopped horsing.” His assumption he was putting over that mahaha got under my skin. “I saw Miss Marino down in the lobby just now. Be my guess she was afraid of somebody then. I come up here, find you ready to plug any unwelcome intruder. Then there’s this, sometime after the maids were here this afternoon, she felt it was necessary to block the door with furniture. Then it was moved back where it belongs. People don’t do it for laughs.”

“Well—” Lanerd dropped the kidding attitude. “Not exactly, perhaps. But it isn’t as serious as you imagine.” He went to the video set again, inspected his wrist watch. “I’ve pledged my word not to tell a soul. But I’m going to tell you, because I can see you’re the persistent kind who’ll keep on until you’ve dug out the answer — and spilled the whole keg of nails, meantime.”

I said, “Damn white of you,” just to be saying something — anything — except what was running through my mind.

How’d you get that blood on your hand?

It was still moist; a thin streak of blood, glistening like a fresh scratch on the back of my left hand. It was no scratch. I hadn’t cut myself.

“There’s nothing sinister about it,” Lanerd was saying. “It’s all in a spirit of good, clean fun.”

He switched on the video set.

Chapter three:

Missing steak knife

My gang at those Friday night Dealer’s Choice Association gatherings will testify I’m far from psychic. But any dummy in a Fifth Avenue window could have sensed something nokay in that suite.

The blood — and the gun — were plain implications. And no security chief can afford violence in his hotel, however much he may admire it from the ringside at Madison Square. Naturally the front office doesn’t expect me to be wise to all the details every time something illegal or immoral goes on behind one of our twelve hundred locked doors. But the management does have a quaint method of insuring against too frequent trouble; unless the head man of the protection staff is sharp enough to catch the warning of those offbeat incidents which break into the regular rhythm of routine, he hunts for another job, but sudden. Hotels, like cars, ought to run smooth and quiet.

The indications of trouble in Suite 21MM were as plain as red blinkers at a grade crossing. Still, could be the troubles weren’t any of my business. I had to bear that in mind; the management being so skittish about being sued by annoyed guests.

Natural reluctance to run into people while wearing an eye patch might have kept a good-looking gal more or less hidden in her rooms for five days. She could have private reasons for two-ing around with a hard-eyed customer in a misfit dinner jacket. There could even be plausible justification for a guy sleeping in a gal’s hotel suite when they weren’t registered as man and wife.

But the blood on my hand was a tough one to explain. I had to find out about that. Even at the risk of offending the big billboard-and-broadcast man.

The gun was the only item I was sure I’d touched since coming in the suite. But if there’d been blood on my hands when I wrangled the automatic away from him, some would have smeared that nice white linen suit. It hadn’t. His sleeve was spotless.

Watching him fiddling with the dials, some of the stuff I’d read in that magazine came back to me:... a playboy who does his most dynamic work while having fun... who goes at sport as aggressively as if it was a top-drawer business deal... shoots golf in the middle seventies... flew his own six-place jet job to Alaska for black bear... sailed his ketch to Easter Island recently for monster marlin...

There’d been pages of such guff; he was a crack squash-rackets man, one of the country’s best off the high diving-board, what it added up to — no panty-waist, he. If the kingpin of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright had been jittery enough to carry side arms, there was more in the wind than cheap cigar smoke.

“No use handing you a lot of horse, Vine.” Now he was giving with the man-to-man approach. No more winning grin. Just a good, honest scowl. “I don’t like this business one damn bit.”

“Makes us even.” I wasn’t certain we were talking about the same thing.

“Suppose not. Well, you may know I have something to do with certain television programs.” He kept his face toward me but his eyes were cocked up at a corner of the ceiling, the way people do when they’re trying to hear a sound behind them.

“Practically subsidize the networks, don’t you?” The bleached-wood top of the coffee table was clean as a hound’s molars. The blood hadn’t come from that.

“Putting it a bit strong.” His smile registered appreciation. “Our clients have several of the high-rated programs. This Stack O’ Jack simulcast which’ll come on here in a second is rather outstanding among audience-participation shows, one of the most popular our agency has developed.” He talked at me but turned his head to one side. His ears would have to be better than mine, to hear anything out in the corridor, over the whoopdeedo booming from the loud-speaker — a blare of trumpets and an announcer who sounded as excited as if he was describing a knockdown in a heavyweight championship:

“Hear-Ye... See-Ye... Whee-Ye!... It’s Stack... O’ Jack... time!”

On the screen, a banner waved sequin-spangled letters:

E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y P-L-A-Y-S

THE KOBLER GLOVE CORPORATION PAYS A STACK O’JACK

Biggest Prizes on the Air

You Can Play It Anywhere

The banner lifted to reveal thick packets of bills, tall piles of silver ducats, a water cooler packed to the spigot with half dollars, a plastic sack big enough to hold a bushel of wheat but crammed full of quarters. All coyly labeled to goose the imagination: $10,000, $7500, $5000, $2500.

It occurred to me I might have grabbed hold of the set during our disarming act. “Never happened to catch your show, Mister Lanerd. Conflicts with the fights.”

He gave out with a prop ha-ha. “You’d get more attractive odds on Stack O’ Jack than at the Garden.” He wondered why I was examining the set, but didn’t ask.

There wasn’t any blood on the cabinet or the carpet around it. “I’ve heard about it. You put on some guess artist, keep him hidden from the audience, but let ’em hear his voice or see the back of his haircut, then pay off if the party you call long distance can identify. That the setup?”

“Guess artist? Very good. Yes.” He did hear something out in the hall then; his hand slid down into the pocket where he had the gun. “Yes. Not quite as simple as that, perhaps. If you watch here for a minute—”

I only half paid attention to the luscious creech who appeared on the screen in close-up, pulling on a pair of gloves, caressing the fingers the way dames do. She had a sensational pair of shoulders; that was about all I noticed because she sat with her back to the cameras, in front of a dressing-table with one of those trick mirrors, counting the reflections; forty snugly gloved fingers frolicked around while some syrupy announcer drooled:

“To you who already appreciate the incomparable luxury of Smoothskin Handwear — to you who plan to compliment your sense of well-being when next you need fine gloves — the Kobler Glove Corporation offers truly the chance of a lifetime — the opportunity to win twenty-five thousand dollars in cash: Twenty... Five... Thousand... Dollars!”

Generally, when people come up with those impressive figures, I listen. Often as not here in the Plaza Royale they actually have that kind of corn and aren’t just blowing Broadway bubbles. But I couldn’t keep my mind on what the spieler was selling; I’d just remembered what it was I’d touched. The door. The door or the jamb leading from the living-room into Miss Marino’s bedroom and bath.

I went to it while violins began to moan about those Pa-a-ale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar.

The hand that had touched the inside of that door hadn’t been so pale.

No doubt about its being a hand; marks of the fingers were still there, sticky-thick crimson blotches on the inside of the French-gray door. Four fingers of a right hand, the marks weren’t large enough for me to be sure whether they’d been made by a man or woman.

There were only those four prints, about a foot above the lock. And on the edge of the door, where it fits the jamb, the thumb had left another smear. That had been before the door had been closed; there was a corresponding streak on the metal jamb. The mark I’d gotten on my hand had come from that edge of the door, where I’d pushed it open a little.

When I turned around Lanerd was watching the screen, but standing so he could have seen me peer around the door, at the jamb.

“This is what I want you to see, Vine.” He beckoned, as some ill-mannered guests do to a bellman.

I didn’t move. I could see all I wanted from where I stood.

On the tube, another cutie was playing a piano, the camera shooting down on the keyboard from above so only her hands and forearms showed. Not even the shoulders, this time.

I don’t know enough about ivory technique to tell whether she was good or not, but her playing was brisk and full of spirit.

The tune was We Won’t Go Home Until Morning; but the words some baritone was enunciating carefully weren’t the ones I knew:

“These are the hands of a charmer

Millions of people have seen

In magazines, newspapers, movies,

And now — on our Stack O’ Jack screen—”

The camera pushed right down close on the hands. The hands and keyboard vanished. A huge question mark took the center of the bulb.

“You understand now, Vine?” Lanerd gave me the chummy, confidential tone, the buddy-to-buddy lift of the bushy gray eyebrows.

“No.” I took a step away from the bedroom door, but stopped, hearing the soft snick of a key in a door lock close by.

“The Stack O’ Jack secret.” Apparently he hadn’t heard the key. “The answer to the twenty-five-thousand-dollar question.”

“Oh.” The door from the corridor to the bedroom began to swing. I stepped into the living-room where I couldn’t be seen, but could peek at reflections in the bureau mirror.

“Miss Marino.” He was beginning to be irritated. “She’s Miss Hands! We’ve been working our tails off to keep her under cover. All sorts of crackpots try to find out who she is — where she lives — so now you see—”

What I saw was a black jacket, a starched shirt, a thin, pale face — in the mirror. I stepped back into the bedroom.

The weak, watery, china-blue eyes of Auguste, our senior room-service captain, opened very wide. Auguste was around fifty; he must have been carrying a napkin over his arm most of his half century; he had all the professional deformities — stoop shoulders, flat feet, an expression of weary disillusionment.

“Mister Fine! Ah, hello — Mister Fine.”

“What you after, Auguste?”

He wiped the back of his left hand with the long, thin bony fingers of his right. “Nozzing of importance, Mister Fine.”

“No?” I went up to him. He still held the pass key between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand; it wiggled while he massaged the knuckles of the other hand. “You usually bust in a suite like this without knocking?”

“I had been told; Miss Marino told me, there would be no one here at this time. So I do not bozzer to knock.”

Lanerd moved in behind me.

“Hi, Auguste. What’s ’a matter?”

“Is only one of the pieces does not come back with the serving-table, Mister Lanerd. So we make check-off. I find it is mizzing. I come back for it, is all.”

“What piece?” I asked.

“A knife, Mister Fine. One of our bone-handled sszteak knifes. Perhaps you haf seen it?”

“No,” I told him. “But I’ll have a look around for it.”

“Pardon, Mister Fine. Is not my intention to bozzer you.”

“That’s all right, Auguste. If I find it, I’ll let you know.”

He said, “Thank you ferry much,” and, “Good efening, Mister Lanerd,” and bowed himself out. I thought he looked more unhappy than usual. If that was possible.

Dow Lanerd slapped my shoulder. “Well, now you’ve been taken behind the scenes, Vine—”

“Haven’t been,” I said. “But I’m going to have a look there, right now.”

Chapter four:

Sitting corpse

Our chariot trade entertains the notion that an assistant manager is merely a convenient mustache stationed in the lobby so upon request he can direct the high-heeled half of our clientele to “the first door on the left upstairs on the mezzanine.” Truth is, some bow ties aren’t good for much else. Reidy Duman is.

Reidy doesn’t make with a headwaiter’s hot buttered hauteur. But he chums with our upper-crust patrons as easily as he gets along with the staff. High score in any hostelry.

So I was glad to see his long-nosed, cleft-chinned countenance poking in from the other bedroom, a minute after Auguste left.

For one thing, the Plaza Royale has a rock-ribbed rule: never unlock a closet in absence of guest — unless an assistant manager is nigh. For another, I couldn’t search the suite and keep an eye on Lanerd, at the same time.

It wouldn’t be fair to suggest he was acting like a man who’d used a steak knife with felonious intent; I’d had no experience along those lines. But he wasn’t acting with the aplomb you’d expect of a business wizard with an international rep. I didn’t turn my back on him, tell you that.

“You dine here in the suite, Mister Lanerd?”

“No.” He didn’t seem to be paying attention to the Stack O’ Jack yammer-yammer any longer; wasn’t even watching the screen. “I have to speak at that banquet downstairs, hour or so. Miss Marino had dinner here with her maid, far’s I know.”

The whoop-it-up lad on the program soothed some party at the other end of the phone, for having guessed Miss Mystery was Dinah Shore and anyhow she was still a great big winner because wasn’t she getting a fine pair of Koblers for free? “How long you been here, Mister Lanerd?”

“About fifteen minutes.” Lanerd backed against the wall as Reidy came in from the other bedroom. If he wasn’t rigid with apprehension, he gave a good imitation of it.

“Evening.” Reidy sensed electricity in the air. He was bland as butter. “Everything all right?” He might have been addressing the wonder-boy.

I answered, “Trying to find out, Reidy. Guest’s out of her suite. Mister Lanerd’s here at her invitation but doesn’t know when she’ll return.” I didn’t mention that he couldn’t have been in the suite with her more than a couple of minutes, if his statement about arriving fifteen minutes ago was on the up and up. It had been just that long since I saw her in the lobby.

“Wait, wait now, Vine.” Lanerd made that ducal gesture of the vertical palm. “Since it’s been necessary to let you in on our secret, no reason you shouldn’t know Miss Marino’s expected back right after the show.” He checked with his wrist watch. “Say, twenty-five minutes.”

He acted as if that explained everything. It didn’t clarify the reason for his standing guard over an empty room, while this Mystery Mamma was at the studio. But Reidy nodded sagely, as if he understood everything, including my going to work with master keys on the two big closets opening off the living-room.

I gave him the gist while I opened doors, switched lights on and off, peered in at empty coat hangers, rawhide luggage marked with T.M.

“Miss Marino’s the gimmick-girl on Mister Lanerd’s Stack O’ Jack video showdeo. They’ve been keeping her under cover; anybody who spotted her as the Mystery Miss would be in line for twenty-five thousand, if he happened to be on the right phone at the same time.”

“The name doesn’t mean much to me.” Reidy shrugged. “But I can understand now why we haven’t seen much of her.”

“Yair, sure.” I wasn’t sure. Those tower suites are all air-conditioned, but I was sweating like a fry cook at the fat kettle. I’d keyed my way into one guest’s rooms, strong-armed another important patron, and trumpeted a hurry call for an assistant manager. For what?

A gun. A splotch of blood. A missing steak knife. But so far, nothing else. Empty closets in the old corral. If that was all, one and all would be extremely vexed. With reason.

Lanerd trailed me into Miss Marino’s bedroom, stood a yard away from the blood-prints on the door without noticing them, apparently, while I gave the quick peek under the twin beds. Blanko.

“Marks on the carpet.” I wanted to wise Reidy to the fact there was more reason for my snooping than met the casual glance.

Reidy knew what the marks meant, took the ball away from me for a minute. “Why should Miss Marino want to block her door? Strictly against fire regulations, you know.” He might have been speaking to me.

Lanerd started to explain. “My agency has naturally insisted on her taking all possible precautions for remaining incognito—” He didn’t finish.

I’d switched on the bulb in the closet nearest the corridor in Miss Marino’s bedroom; Lanerd and Reidy could see the legs the second the light went on. Man’s legs amid a mass of femme footwear. Big legs in black dress pants, big feet stretched out so polished toes glinted in the glare.

I got down on one knee, pulled the hangered dresses and night things aside so I could see the rest of him. He’d been propped up with his back to the closet wall and his knees hunched up under his chin. His right hand lay on a pair of golden slippers.

His head lolled over on one side; the eyes were open, so was his mouth. He wasn’t as big as his legs had made me expect, but he must have been over six feet; the long, narrow, bony face made him look tall. It wasn’t a handsome face but its thin, high forehead lent him a look of alertness. For all the good it may have done him.

Lanerd muttered, “Crysake! For crysake! That’s torn it!”

Reidy stayed behind Lanerd, called past the adman’s shoulder, “Dead, Gil?” He knew the answer.

I bent over so I could see the gashes in the back of the dead man’s tux between the shoulder blades, the soggy streaks crawling like snail slime down toward the small of his spine. Maybe you get used to that sort of thing if you see enough of it. Looking at that was more than enough for me. I had to swallow hard before I said, “Somebody worked on him with a knife.”

I shoved back the silkies on the dress hangers, looked in the corners of the closet for the steak knife. It wasn’t there.

Reidy asked what a hotel man naturally would, “He a guest, Gil?”

“Doubt it.” Without moving him too much, I felt in the dead man’s pockets for a wallet or keys or letters. The wallet was there; there was silver in his pockets; I didn’t remove either. There was a holster under his left armpit. It was loaded. He’d never had a chance to pull it.

Lanerd cleared his throat. “Name was Roffis. He was a — a guard — here to protect our star performer—”

“She wasn’t the only one who needed protection.” Reidy’s face was oyster-gray.

I knew what Duman was thinking, but it didn’t seem possible. If Lanerd had done the butcher job, his clothes would have shown it. It wasn’t reasonable to suppose he’d have waited around the suite after the murder. There were other points, but I didn’t want to go into them then. I went to the phone.

“Hold it! Hold it, godsake!” Lanerd made his stop-sign gesture again. “You don’t want to call the cops!”

“I don’t?” I picked up the handset. “Let me have Mona, honeychile. This’s Mister V.” Mona’s our switchboard super, a very crisp cookie in the headwork department.

Lanerd held out both palms, pleading, “There’s a hell of a lot of things you don’t know about this business. If you’ll wait about ten minutes, Miss Millett will be back and—”

“Millett?”

“That’s right, that’s right!” Lanerd smoothed his carved-marble hair with both hands. “Miss Marino is Tildy Millett.”

Reidy was startled. “The Queen of Skates? Here in the house?”

“Oh, oh!” My surprise wasn’t due to her checking in under a nom de hotel. Plenty of people do, besides the John-Smith-and-wife couples who check in those midtown flea-bags after the niteries close. What jolted me was that I’d seen the Sweetheart of the Silver Skates, that’s the way they usually billed her, half a dozen times at the Music Hall, and she hadn’t looked anything like the lovely señorita with the fancy comb.

Lanerd went on distractedly. “That’s why she wears that eye-patch disguise and keeps out of sight all she can. But—”

Mona murmured, “’Sme, Mister V. What’ll it be?”

“Slight delay,” I told her. “I’ll call back. Sit on this plug, will you?”

She said she would. I racked the phone, turned to Lanerd.

“Your idea she murdered this guy?” I asked.

“No, no.” He groaned. “Stake my life she didn’t. It’s worse than that. The person who did that” — he stared at Roffis in horror — “is trying to kill her, too.”

Chapter five:

D.A. cover-up?

Back when a security officer didn’t resent being called house dick to his face, it was sometimes possible to put the shush on a murder in a hotel. A freemealing district captain would occasionally return past favors by hustling an assistant medical examiner over to certify the corpse before newshounds got wind of the crime. But there’ve been some changes made.

Even in those days, a homicide in the suite of a notable couldn’t have been kept quiet. Especially a nationally known character like Tildy Millett. She was what you might call a famous figure; the simplest silhouette of any trim-limbed femme in a short, flared-out skirt was merely a trade-mark for Tildy. Dame like that would be news if she did nothing more’n switch from one brand of face powder to another.

Tildy Millett, the name was up there in incandescent lights somewhere on the Main Stem practically all the time. The crowds who’d swarmed to see the Icequadrilles, or made Holiday On Ice a six-week holdover, or seen her Skate Mates in Technicolor, they’d have wolfed any gossip about her. Even before this Mystery Miss hodelyo.

So it didn’t seem as if there was any chance to avoid flash-bulbing and scare-headlining in connection with this dead man.

I felt sorry for the poor guy; probably he’d been an all-right joe whose folks and friends would miss him plenty. But I didn’t know Roffis, whereas I did know just how much grief his death would cause around the Plaza Royale. If Dow Lanerd had any good reason for delaying the yapping of the hounds, I was ready to listen.

I asked if he thought she knew something about the murder.

“She was here with Roffis just before I came across from my rooms.” Lanerd was trying to decide how far into his confidence to take us. “He was supposed to escort her over to the studio. But about ten minutes before the three of them were scheduled to start — her maid Nikky goes everywhere with her — Roffis disappeared. Just like that. They looked through the suite for him, couldn’t find any trace, finally got worried, and called me because they were scared to go out without a guard.”

Reidy looked at the blood-prints on the door. “How about this maid?”

“No, no. Nikky might use a knife on a man — to defend herself.” Lanerd waggled his hand to indicate excitability. “Nikky Narian has what you might call a mercurial temperament. But she’d never have done a thing like this.” He squatted beside me, reached toward the dead man.

I pushed him away. “They’ll be checking everything but the ceiling for prints.” He didn’t push easy. I shoved harder.

He didn’t like that. He wasn’t used to it. His neck got red under the golf-links tan. “Roffis had a key to this suite. I wanted to find out if it’s still on him.”

“Don’t.” I went to the phone. “Mona?”

A brusque voice behind me: “Pudda phone down.” I did as requested. The guy in the door was the prissy-mouth with the misfit tuxedo. He had his right hand in the pocket of his dinner jacket just as Lanerd had. But the newcomer had an uglier scowl.

Lanerd burst out, “Where is she, Hacklin?”

Hacklin shifted his eyes from me to Reidy and back again.

“These hotel people?”

“Mister Vine’s the security chief.” Lanerd waved at me. “The other—”

“Duman.” Reidy frowned. “Assistant manager.”

I asked, “And you?”

With his left hand Hacklin reached around to his hip pocket, brought out a wallet, flipped it open, in one smooth, practiced movement.

From his manner I guessed he was flashing a buzzer, one of those gold-plated items which get plain-clothes men through many a door where they aren’t welcome. But it wasn’t that. It was an identification, complete with photo. Fat type across the top said: Office of the District Attorney, City of New York. Typed-in letters said that Hacklin, Byrd A., was a duly-authorized special assistant to the Prosecutor in charge of homicide investigations.

It only took a couple of seconds, that inspection of credentials. But I did some high-speed cerebration in that brief space.

Something a lot bigger than a video guessing-game was going on, for certain. Special assistants to homicide prosecutors don’t go a-squiring beauteous babes just because a choice sum is at stake!

Hacklin stalked to the closet. Standing in the living-room door he could have seen the body, but I hadn’t been sure he had, until I saw there was no change of expression on his wide, stolid face.

“We been workin’ together six years.” Hacklin’s voice was flat, emotionless. He surveyed the body for a long breath. “He stood up for my kid’s christening, last month.”

“Tough.” I meant it.

“Any idea who gave it to him?”

I said, “Somebody with a steak knife. All we know.”

“Who found him?”

I said I had; Hacklin studied me impassively. Lanerd gripped Hacklin’s shoulder. “Didn’t Tildy come back from the studio with you?”

“She gave me the run-around. She and that tricky maid.” Hacklin satisfied himself the gun was still in Roffis’s holster. He slid his hand down to the dead man’s right leg, let his fingers rest there a second, patted the knee several times rapidly. “I can stick with a female most places, but when she begs off to go to the john, lets me out. There’s a corridor outside that new studio, between it and the can. I waited across the hall. After ten minutes I sent one of the actresses in; Miss Millett and the maid had scramoosed.”

Reidy frowned. “Doesn’t mean she killed this man.”

Hacklin eyed him bleakly. “Don’t strain your brain speculating about this. It’s official business. My business. Herb was my partner. I don’t want any theorists mucking around with it. All I want you to do is lock your lip and get out of here. Oh, one thing. Call Spring four nine-one-two-one on a pay phone. Ask for Schneider. Tell him to jump over here fast. Got that? Four nine-one-two-one.”

Reidy didn’t care much for the way it was put to him. He looked to me for a cue. In his book I’m the guy to be giving orders when trouble is busting around the Plaza Royale. That’s how my book reads, too. But I’d been working in the dark up to then. I wanted more light before I began to throw my weight around. So I reassured Reidy.

“We’re all in a fog. But Hacklin seems to know the road. Let him drive, time being.”

Hacklin growled, deep in his throat, as if he was minded to tell me off. But he didn’t. He repeated, “Don’t call through the hotel switchboard. And don’t come back up here, or tell a damn soul what’s happened. Thanks.”

Reidy nodded dourly. “Spring four nine-one-two-one, Schneider.” He flicked me on the arm with the back of his hand, took a parting shot at the bull in the china shop. “You’re in charge, Gil.” He went away before Hacklin tried to challenge that last remark.

Lanerd began, “What, for godsake, we going to do about—”

Hacklin rubbed one hand over his face as if to shut out the whole scene — the dead man, all of us. “Tell you what you’re going to do, Mister Lanerd. You’re going to chase over to Video City, get hold of anybody who might have seen Miss Millett depart, anybody who had any idea where she went.”

“Hell, I can’t! I’m due to make a speech downstairs at a convention banquet in just about—”

“Hell with your social obligations.” None of the deference due the Great Man in Hacklin’s tone. “Get over there, find out where she went, where she is. Don’t argue. We’ve played it your way long’s we’re going to. Herb wouldn’t be dead now if we’d done if different.”

Lanerd agreed with poor grace. “I’m sorry about Roffis. Damn sorry. I’ll do what I can to find Tildy.”

“Phone me when you get to the studio.”

“Right.”

“I don’t have to ask you to keep quiet about this?” Hacklin asked wearily.

“No, no.” Lanerd seemed to be glad to get out.

On the chance the hotel’s name might somehow be kept out of the tabloids, I let Hacklin know where I stood.

“One thing sure, you don’t have to ask me!”

“Don’t I?” He had a mean glint in his eye. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m about to ask you plenty!”

Chapter six:

Dead stoolies don’t sing

Ex-cops never make good house officers. In uniform, they get too used to pushing people around, can’t overcome the habit. That bulldozing approach makes ’em liabilities around a hotel. This Hacklin was demonstrating.

He wasn’t actually a blue, still he had the law behind him. But I couldn’t let him snap that Simon Legree lash at me. Not so any bellman or floor maids could overhear him; the Chinese aren’t the only people sensitive about face. So I threw the first punch.

“Don’t mind my taking that call-back from Lieutenant Weissman, when it comes?”

All I meant was to jolt him out of that browbeating frame of mind. Show him I had friends over at the precinct. What my phoney question did, though, was bring him to me, jaw a-jutting.

“You phoned Harry Weissman?”

“Why not? Harry’s handled grief like this for us before.”

We do get along with the precinct badges; hand them a pinch on a platter now and again.

“You actually speak to him?” The whites of Hacklin’s eyes looked like the bluish skin of a hard-boiled egg left too long in the icebox.

“Not yet.”

“Then don’t.” He put up his left hand to shove me, boys-in-the-back-room style.

I had to make up my mind, fast. Let him get that edge on me, or risk a real muss. If it came to a kilkenny, he’d have, say, forty pounds on me. I only pushed the pointer up to one seventy, dripping wet. Hacklin had beef on his bones. But if he got away with his rough-riding, in no time he’d be ordering me around like a headwaiter bossing a new bus boy.

I took a step back so he wouldn’t rock me on my heels, used both hands to grab the fingers of the one he pushed out at me. He thought I was trying to fend him off, kept shoving. I bent his palm back toward his chest with all the force I could get into it.

He slugged at me with his right. The blow had no force; he was pulling away from me as he punched, bending at the knees, twisting to free his hand from that leverage.

I let go before any bones cracked. You can easy snap a wrist with that judo hold. Hacklin dropped to one knee to save himself from toppling. He looked ugly enough to go for his gun, so I spoke up quick; he could have taken it for salve, if he wanted to.

“I don’t mind playing on your team, coach, but les’ save that strong arm for the other side, hah?”

He came up on both feet, red-faced, hot-eyed. All his downtown training and associations were in favor of his making something of it. I think he would have if I hadn’t pointed to the bedroom door.

“Did you spot these blood-prints, coach?”

He made that great-big-papa-bear noise, deep in his throat. His eyes still smoldered. But he moved them from me to the door. “You must have picked that grip up in a commando unit.”

That called for no comment; I didn’t make any. “Have to get you to show it to me again sometime.” He wanted me to know it was only a temporary truce. “Meanwhile, get straight. I’m calling signals on this team. Don’t notify Weissman. That’s an order.”

If it made him feel better, that was jake with me. “More gore on the inside of that door jamb.” I showed him.

“How come you were mucking around her suite, anyhow, Vine?”

I told him. About Elsie and the pillow slip. Lanerd and his automatic.

“What about the steak knife?” He puzzled over the finger marks on the door.

“Auguste. One of our room-service captains. He’s been serving up here; probably the tips are too fat to let one of his regular waiters work the suite. Tonight, after the service tables were wheeled down, the routine checkup showed one knife missing. Auguste came back for it. I did a simple sum. Four bloody fingerprints minus one knife equals somebody slashed. So I searched around.”

“Queer prints,” Hacklin muttered. “They outline the fingers. But there aren’t any whorl marks or loops, even where the blood’s drying. Maybe the boys can get an impression out of them, but to me it looks like they were made by somebody with gloves on. Your waiters wear gloves?”

“Sometimes. In summer time. Cotton whites.” I didn’t like the direction his quiz was taking. “You’re not going to dust off that oldie about an inside job!”

“Very likely,” he admitted. “We been on guard against that since we came in here.”

“I take it back. Not going to play for your team, after all.”

“Maybe we don’t want you, Vine. You a gambling man?”

“Where there’s an element of judgment involved.” I couldn’t figure what difference it made. “Any further details, see my bookie.”

“Horses, huh?” He mulled it over as if it was something serious. “You happen to read that guff about Johnny the Grocer?”

I had. “Fixer who got himself riddled in some East Side hotspot, three or four days ago?” I began to connect up his queries about gambling. “Payoff lad for a policy ring. Supposed to deliver protection lettuce to cops. Held out some green goods he’d been told to pass along. Big boys got him for it.”

Hacklin waggled his hand in derision. “That’s what the newspapers said. Fact is, Johnny’d been taking singing lessons, was all set to give a recital. He’d been through a couple rehearsals, in the Prosecutor’s office. Real performance was to have been Wednesday morning at headquarters. Rumor was, he’d finger some high-ups on the Commissioner’s Confidential Squad. Tuesday night somebody played the drum for him. Boom! Only testimony he gave was to the docs when they cut him up, on the slab.”

“From what I read, nobody saw who gunned him.” The picture was beginning to take shape in my mind, a little blurred. “Or was that more newspaper mahooley?”

“Yeah.” Hacklin took out a cigar, stuck it in his mouth at an angle like a schooner’s bowsprit. “I got to tell you this so you’ll see why it was prob’ly an inside job.”

I said I wouldn’t guarantee to go along on that.

“You’ll go along — or come along, don’t worry about that.” He flexed the fingers I’d punished. “It was given out officially that nobody saw the actual shooting or the crut who used the gun. But there was one witness.”

“Tildy Millett.” I’d seen that coming.

“Yeah. Johnny Scaluck was drilled in one of two phone booths that stand right adjoining. He got it through the glass, while he was gabbing. Waiters rushed to the booth but the gunman ducked through a fire door. Nobody remembered seeing him. But after the commotion was over, Herb hustled over to quiz around for the Prosecutor’s office. He found Miss Millett had been in the next booth only a few seconds before Johnny got his. She’d seen the murderer but had been too scared to say so ’til Herb dragged it out of her.”

“How’d she happen to be in a dive like the Blue Blazer, anyway?” That wasn’t the question I really wanted an answer to: What if this killer was still roaming our corridors?

“Lanerd was with her. They didn’t want to go to the class joints, afraid she’d be recognized.” Hacklin tongued the unlighted cigar around. “After she identified this chopper, ordinarily we’d have turned her over to the police, protective custody. But the Prosecutor didn’t want any more mortalities among his witnesses. Johnny the Grocer’d been dropped because he was going to incriminate some high-placed cops. So we didn’t even tell the Centre Street people about her, or let on she’d seen the murderer.”

“You didn’t even tell the security office.” No matter what he thought, that had been dumb.

He didn’t bother to answer. “We had a conference with Lanerd and her agent. They told us Miss Millet was under ironclad contract to appear on this Stack O’ Jack show until somebody guessed her identity. They were ready to tear the Criminal Courts building down, brick by brick, if we tried to keep her from appearing on the show.”

“This killer—” I realized why Lanerd had found that gun so comfortable, nestling in his pocket — “this murderer knew she’d seen him at the time of the shooting?”

“Sure. He warned her to keep her mouth shut or he’d get her, later.”

“Then, supposedly, he’d tell his friends on the Confidential Squad about her, wouldn’t he?”

“He might.” Hacklin spat out a shred of leaf. “Or he might not. He wouldn’t know she’d picked his picture out of the Gallery. ’Course we don’t know for positive any of the force was connected with Scaluck’s wipe-out. But the idea was not to take any chances. That’s why I don’t go for your talking to this lieutenant pal of yours.”

“So you let Tildy Millett stay here. Knowing her being here put other people in danger.” I was beginning to stew about what a killer like that would do if he was cornered in a hotel.

“Either Herb was with her or I was with her all the time. Herb had the noon to midnight tour; I came on at twelve and stayed till noon. I suppose you could have done more than we did!”

“Goes without saying. Two of you. Eight hundred hotel employees. But that’s locking the stable. How about letting us have photos of this killer so we can watch for him?”

“He’s Al Gowriss. Two-time loser. A morphy, besides. Stop at nothing when he’s geared up.” Hacklin took a police flyer out of his pocket, unfolded it.

The muddy photo showed a lean, mean face with narrow-set eyes menacing out of deep-shadowed sockets; I’d never have forgotten features like those, if I’d seen them. “New to me.” I glanced at his record. Al Gowriss, alias Al Gorce, Al Manning, etc., etc. Two convictions. A dozen arrests for armed robbery, atrocious assault, manslaughter. Warning: dangerous, likely to be armed. “Sweet boy.”

“Most likely he wouldn’t have tried to crash in here; he’d be as out of place as a crocodile in a pansy bed, around a swankery like this. He’d hire somebody who could get into her room with no trouble.”

“That ‘inside job’ is a fixed idea of yours.” I smelled cigarette smoke, strong cigarettes, probably British.

A wavery wisp of gray drifted in under the corridor door — there’s a quarter-inch space above the sill so floor patrols can check for fire at night. Our air-conditioning pulls a slight draft in under all the doors.

Hacklin was puzzled by my going toward the door. “Gowriss would have had enough dough to hire a dozen room-service waiters.” He eyed my movements suspiciously. “What’re you—”

I jerked open the door before he unwittingly warned the smoker.

The blonde must have had her ear smack against the panel; she sprawled into the room.

When I caught her, to keep her from falling, she didn’t try to free herself. Instead she looked at me, eyes swimming with tears.

“Let me see him,” she whispered. “Please let me see him before they take him away!”

Chapter seven:

Keyhole-peeping blonde

She was what our maître d’hotel would have called a dish of the most desirable. Medium height, lithe waist, and — not to kick the clichés around too much — stocking-ad legs, diving-girl figger. Say, twenty-twoish. Eyes too large for the small, sunburned oval of her face; behind the tear-glisten they were grayish-green with sparks of deeper, luminous emerald. Like the gleam in a cat’s eyes when headlights hit them. Snub nose, reddened at the tip; evidently she’d had the weeps for some time.

Those lobby experts who claim to be able to name what part of the country a guest hails from, what he’s worth, his profession or business, merely by sizing up clothing, jewelry, luggage, and mannerisms, they wouldn’t have doped out a great deal from her.

I couldn’t tell anything from the white nylon print in Tahitian pattern — scarlet and gray. It went nicely with the pale, corn-silky hair sleeked back from her forehead.

She might have bought that dress in one of the Fifty-Seventh Street shoppes where they tax an extra twenty for the label, or it could have come from a bargain counter free-for-all down on Fourteenth. Her hairdo told nothing. All she carried was that British reeker which had given her away. I did notice she filed her nails short, the way our public stenos keep theirs.

I wasn’t in any rush to let her go. Hacklin moved in beside me to block her off from peeking past us at the body.

“Who you want to see?” His tone was equivalent to flashing a badge.

She raised her left hand, touched the tip of her cigarette to the back of my thumb. I let go for just that split second that allowed her to wrench away, dodge around me, to where she could get a good look at the dead man.

“Dowie.” It was hardly a whisper; she kept it under her breath in a kind of smothered wail.

Hacklin made a grab for her, caught her, but only because she’d frozen into a crouch in front of the closet.

“It’s not — not him!” She began to blubber, leaning limply against Hacklin, who couldn’t think of anything better than to shake her.

“Cut it,” he commanded. “Shuddup!”

She raised the level a shrill half-pitch.

I thought he was going to slap her, in the style illustrated in the movies as recommended treatment for hysterical females. But she buried her face on his chest, so he couldn’t.

“I heard you say — somebody was dead.” She sniffled. “I thought it was Dow.”

Hacklin pushed her away, to the arm of a divan. “You’re the dame I saw in the studio. You Missus Lanerd?”

“No.” She shook her head like a dog coming out of water. “I’m Ruth Moore. Mister Lanerd’s private secretary.”

I stopped licking the place where she’d burned my thumb. “Why were you making like a gossipeeper in the corridor?”

“Mister Lanerd wasn’t at the studio.” She glanced over her shoulder at Roffis, shivered. “He’s always at the studio, program nights. When he didn’t show up, I asked Miss Millett where he was; she said he’d stayed here at the hotel. She seemed terribly upset about something; that didn’t make me worry any less. Jeff, he’s our producer, he couldn’t tell me anything, either. He was bothered about Mister Lanerd’s absence, too. So I hurried back here to his suite, thinking that was where Miss Millett meant. But he wasn’t over there. Then I heard voices across the hall. I knew there shouldn’t be anyone in Miss Millett’s rooms, so I came and listened at the door.”

Hacklin grunted skeptically. “How long you been keyholing out there?”

“Only a minute or two.” She did what she could to fix her face with her soggy handkerchief. “Who — did that?” She pointed at Roffis.

Hacklin raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t have any idea?”

“No.” Then it struck her; Lanerd’s absence, the dead man, the officer investigating. She slapped the handkerchief to her mouth. “Oh, no! You couldn’t possibly suspect Mister Lanerd of a thing like that!” Probably Hacklin hadn’t, up to then. But it must have occurred to him now that his boss downtown might ask why he’d sent Lanerd away after he’d been found in the same room with a murdered man. “When were you last in this suite, Miss Moore?”

“I’ve never been in here before.” She had herself pretty well under control.

“You seem to know your way around the hotel right well. How’d you get into Lanerd’s rooms?” That accusing-finger method didn’t adorn Hacklin’s style.

I thought he’d gone far enough. “Mister Lanerd often uses his duplex for business entertainment. His advertising-agency crowd comes and goes, all hours of day and night. Miss Moore could get a key just by asking. Expect she’s known, down at the desk.”

“Yes, indeed.” She nodded gratefully.

Hacklin didn’t care for my interference. “Nobody’s going to come and go in here, tell you that. You stay put, Miss Moore, till I get a detail statement from you.”

“Tsk, tsk,” I tsked him. “Girl’s unstrung. Let her go back to Lanerd’s suite. I’ll be responsible for her.” The phone jangled. I moved toward it. That was all he needed to urge him to beat me to it.

As he picked up the handset, I motioned her out.

“Thank you!” She started to leave.

Hacklin rumbled at the phone. “Gone where?... Lexington?” He hollered at Miss Moore, “Come back here!” then apologized to the party on the other end of his line. “I’m not talking to you, go on... that’s like sayin’ Main Street, there’s a Lexington ’n every one of the forty-eight — huh?... Kentucky?”

The secretary got to the door. A large, meaty-faced individual in rumpled seersucker barred her way. “Excuse me.” She tried to edge past.

He didn’t move.

I called, “Schneider!” I hoped he was Schneider! “’S all right.”

The wary eyes of a trained observer went from her to me, to Hacklin, finally to the outstretched feet in the closet. He assumed I knew what I was doing, stepped aside long enough to let the Moore kid get out. He hurried to the closet.

“Holy Mother! Herb!”

Hacklin shouted, “Hey, you!” and had to apologize to the phone again. “Not talking to you, Mister Lanerd!.. Your secretary... well, okay... Call back soon’s you find out.”

He hung up, glowering. “What you think you’re doin’, countermanding my orders?”

Schneider squatted in front of the dead man, swearing in a steady monotone.

I put on my Sunday look of innocent astonishment. “You’re trying to keep this Johnny-the-Grocer business sub rosa. How you going to do that if you start badgering Lanerd’s secretary?”

Schneider gave me the slow up and down. “Whatsit, Byrd?”

“House officer,” Hacklin snarled. “Name of Vine.”

“A wise-o?” Schneider pursed his lips.

“Just a guy who knows his job,” I said. “Now, if you were to ask me politely, instead of bellowing like boars in a bog, I might offer assistance with a few things you’ll need help on. Checking our floor patrol to see if he noticed any loiterer in the corridor. Elevator operators to find out if they brought this Gowriss up here.”

Hacklin was caught between an urge to jump me through the hoops and a realization that he hadn’t much dope to pass on to the D.A., except what I’d given or could give him. “Okay, Vine. We’ll get back to the Moore girl later. To you, too.” He stared at me with the surgical inspection Sandor gives unknown applicants at the velvet rope down in the Calypso Room. “Herd that waiter up here, pronto. And round up all your employees who’ve been in this suite last couple days.”

I shook my head decisively. “No.”

Schneider caught my shoulder, spun me to face him. “Whaddya mean, no?”

“No can do. Day-side staff’s off duty. Shift quits at six. Most of ’em’ll be out painting the town, nice Saturday night. Some of ’em won’t be in tomorrow, either. Day off.” I let him pull me around enough so it could have been accidental that my heel ground on the toe of his shoe. I didn’t apologize. “Thing is, you DAides don’t know anything about how a hotel is run. If you started fine-combing our bellmen and floor maids, you’d panic everybody by spreading rumors a murderer’s prowling the corridors!”

Schneider was working himself up to taking a sock at me. But Hacklin growled, “Leave him alone, Charley. Go on down, phone the office. Ask Frank and Bailey to drop everything, get over here. Muncey, too. We’ll get around to Smart Stuff here, later on.”

“That’ll be the day.” Schneider left.

Hacklin rubbed his chin. “Herb was a friend of Charley’s.”

“Put me down for flowers, too.” If I sounded caustic, it was the way I felt. “But don’t expect me to help you make your next blunder. You want something out of the staff, ask me. Do what I can to get it for you. Start chivvying them on your own, I’ll buck you from here to Albany.”

I went out before he decided maybe I wasn’t going to toss Auguste to the lions, after all.

When I knocked at 2ICC, Ruth Moore opened the door before my knuckles hit the second time.

“Shouldn’t do that,” I told her. “Open the door to anybody who knocks.”

“I was sure it was you.”

“Ask, before you let anyone in. Party who did that stab job may still be on the floor.” I went over to the French windows opening onto the private terrace overlooking Central Park; under a striped cabana canopy there were half a dozen beach chairs and chaises, but nothing bigger than a Pomeranian could have been hiding out there. “Your boss is over at the studio trying to get on Tildy Millett’s trail.”

“He’s been spending a good deal of time at it.” She was acid. “Maybe what she’s done now will change that.”

“Think she killed the guy across the hall?”

“Why else would she run away?” The luminous emerald gleamed in her eyes.

“Might be other reasons.”

“Oh, yes. I know them. But they’re all tied in together, her reasons for running away, for murdering her bodyguard.”

“Lanerd?”

She studied me. “I wish I knew whether I could trust you?”

I said I wouldn’t guarantee it. But she could try.

Chapter eight:

Cash requested

The D.A.’s office has its own copyrighted brand of double talk. “An arrest is imminent” usually means the Prosecutor doesn’t have a suspect in sight. “Painstaking detective work has resulted in a roundup of the entire gang of criminals” can be translated to “a stool pigeon talked plenty.” Same with “inside job.” That’s police-ese for “no clues.”

But that last term is poison to any security man. We hear it enough. Countess Falsiebra accuses a floor maid of stealing a dinner ring, positive it must have been an “inside job.” I search around, find the ring where the countess left it, on the edge of the tub behind the shower curtain.

Calling an employee “thief” is bad enough. But if word got around we had a killer on our payroll, in twenty-four hours we’d have more empty rooms than all the unheated Maine motels in midwinter. If Ruth Moore could point the finger in some other direction, even in the direction of a fabulous guest like Tildy Millett, that was better than having one of the staff under suspicion.

But apparently she wasn’t sure it was the thing to do. To cover her indecision, she mumbled, “Excuse me,” slid into the bedroom at the left.

I followed as far as the door. A killer who’d wanted to observe the goings and comings in 21MM couldn’t have had a better watchtower than that particular bedroom. Its corridor door was exactly opposite Tildy’s bedroom. As I’d just told Hacklin, it wouldn’t have been difficult for any well-dressed lad with jaunty assurance to get a key to the suite paid for by Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright.

It wouldn’t have been too much of a trick for such a person to keep out of sight; few of the visitors to the suite would have spent much time in that bedroom. The beds were littered with attaché cases, cartons of cigarettes, stacks of purple and yellow studio tickets bound with rubber bands.

“I ought to get Mister Lanerd’s permission before saying anything, Mister Vine.” She went to the bureau, turned her head to frown at me, reached into the drawer without looking, and pulled out a man’s monogrammed hanky. “But it’s no secret Tildy has a disposition that’s as unpredictable as a woman driver at a yellow light. She can be so-o-o sweet one minute, poison the next.”

“Why would she carve a man who was protecting her?”

“Maybe he wasn’t. If he’d been making a pass at her—”

“—and Lanerd walked in? That what’s in your mind?”

“It — is — not!”

“Lanerd’s been playing kneesie with her?”

She flapped the handkerchief derisively. “Mister Lanerd doesn’t keep me informed about such things. She might, as you so daintily put it, have been trying to get him to — play kneesie with her. He’s very attractive—”

“Can imagine.”

“He’s so naive about women. They take advantage of him!” The fiercely defensive way she said it, it didn’t sound silly.

“Maybe he had a notion this bodyguard was taking his duties too literally?”

“Mister Lanerd wouldn’t ever be jealous. He hates that sort of thing. That’s why he was so angry when Mrs. Lanerd—” She put the handkerchief to her mouth as if she’d said more than she meant to.

I thought she’d intended to let the innocent remark slip out.

“Mrs. Lanerd was disturbed about her husband’s relations with the skating star?”

She puckered her forehead dubiously. “If you say I told you so, I’ll say you lie.”

“’Kay. Say.”

“Marge — Mrs. Lanerd — was here. Over there, I mean.” She pointed toward the MM suite. “This afternoon. She raised hell. Told off our Mystery Miss, but good. You could hear ’em clear out in the corridor.”

“You could?” Then it hadn’t been her first time with her ear glued to the panel, a few minutes ago. “What’d you hear?”

“Names. Threats.” Suddenly the secretary seemed miserable. “You can’t blame Marge. Dow’s always—” apparently she realized for the first time she’d been using her employer’s first name, was confused for a moment, “getting tangled up with skirts — and having trouble getting untangled.”

“Way it goes. What time was this?”

“Around five. Mister Lanerd wasn’t here then.”

“He know his wife came to the hotel?”

“I don’t think so. Marge didn’t wait for him. Or leave any message. She didn’t know I was here, either.”

“The threats, now. They what you meant by Miss Millett’s having another reason for running away after the show?”

There was a knock on the living-room door. She hurried out of the bedroom.

I called, “Come in.”

A tall, wedge-shouldered, ruddy-faced individual in full tails and white tie smiled affably at me, at Miss Moore.

“We’re waiting for our principal speaker—”

The secretary stepped in. “Oh, I’m so terribly sorry, Mister Yaker. Mister Vine, Mister Yaker.” She made the introduction with nice timing that didn’t allow for either of us to learn anything except the other’s name. “But I’m afraid Mister Lanerd won’t be able to make the banquet.”

“Oh, now!” The Yaker person smoothed back short, sandy crew-cut hair which needed no smoothing; he screwed up his pleasant, weather-reddened features into a grimace of disappointment. “I’ve been holding those hundred and fifty men to their chairs on the strength of Mister Lanerd being able to—”

“He’s so distressed about it.” Ruth Moore made him feel she was distressed, too. “He asked me to have you extend his personal apologies to everyone at the dinner and to say that if he is asked again he will certainly be delighted to make up for the—”

I left her soothing him. The phone was burring. When I picked it up and said, “Hello,” the earpiece replied:

“How y’ doin’, lovey-duck?” An oddly agreeable, throaty, feminine drawl.

“Just fine.” If she didn’t recognize it wasn’t Lanerd on the line, she couldn’t know him very well.

“This is Edie, honey-pie.”

“Good ole Edie,” I said brightly. “What’s th’ good word?”

“You know what the good word is, shugie.” The throaty voice giggled. “Cash is th’ bes’ word there is.”

“Might have something there, Edie.”

“I’ll have it when you give it to me. That little matter’s been taken care of. When do we talk payment?”

“Any time at all.” I knew of only one piece of recent business concerning Dow Lanerd that a canary like this might be interested in, but, of course, I didn’t know all of Lanerd’s current doings. By any means. Ruth Moore was still pouring syrup on the disappointed Crew Cut. “Come on up.”

“No, ’deed. You come on down here. I want to get this deal closed right hasty.”

“Where you now?”

“High in the saddle, down here at the Steeplechase. C’mon down an’ take a hurdle with me.”

“Be along in a minute.”

“Don’t make me wait, sugar-pie.” She hung up. Before I did, Ruth Moore was hanging on my arm. Trying to get the phone away from me.

Chapter nine:

Plushy couple

“It’s my job to handle his phone calls.” Ruth Moore was disturbed. “Who was that?”

“Not your boss. Or his wife.”

“Tildy?” The cat-green showed in her eyes.

“No.” Seemed to me, no matter how private a secretary she was, there’d be no need for her to know about a call like that. “Why’d Crew Cut have to call in person? Couldn’t he have phoned?”

“Roy Yaker?” She gestured, annoyed. “That false alarm! He’s staying here — floor below, I think. He said he had telephoned from the Crystal Room but there was no answer. He thought Mister Lanerd might have been — taking a shower — so he came on up here.”

I wondered, out loud, who Yaker was.

“Secretary of this new association; he’s only using Mister Lanerd as bait to get members to his dinner. I told him the boss was unavoidably detained — crucial conference.”

She dismissed Yaker with a second gesture. “Was that call for Mister Lanerd?”

“For me,” I lied. “Let’s get back to Mrs. Lanerd. You’re not suggesting she murdered this Roffis in order to get in to see the Tildy gal?”

“Oh, no! I don’t know how to put it—”

“Put it straight.”

“I thought perhaps the guard, after hearing Marge threaten Miss Millett, offered to keep quiet about her and Dow — Mister Lanerd — if he, the guard, I mean, could—” She made a show of being confused.

“It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing a picked man from the Prosecutor’s office would try.” I had the feeling she was fumbling around for anything that might distract me from Lanerd. “You ever take tips from strangers?”

“Not generally.” She was wary.

“Make an exception.” I patted her arm to show no hard feelings. “A pack of bloodhounds’ll be sniffing all over this floor in a few minutes. If there’s anything here — stuff in the closets or bathroom, you know — anything that might cause Mister Lanerd — or his secretary — hm, embarrassment — be a good thing to see to it, hah?”

She relaxed enough to crinkle up her eyes. “You’re not my idea of a house dick at all.”

“That’s the trick. Not to be like one.” I squeezed her arm, went out.

The corridor was empty. 21MM was quiet.

With the Prosecutor’s office trying to keep the police in the dark, there were various possibilities. All bad. The Plaza Royale, specifically, the security staff, could easily get in the middle, wind up being booted by both sides.

Tim Piazolle was at the report desk in my outer office when I got down to 303. I looked over his shoulder as he manhandled the typewriter.

8:47 p.m. Ordered two debewtants off the mezz: had spotted them dropping cig. ashes on heads of lobby crowd below. Said they knew manager, would have me fired.

“That does it.” I sighed. “You’re fired.”

Tim grinned, his homely, raw-hamburg face shiny with sweat. “Fine work for an able-bodied citizen. Shooing schoolgirls off a balcony.”

“You want excitement? We have a coffin case in the house.”

That pricked up his ears. I briefed him on the doings up in 21MM, meanwhile flipping through the personnel file for Auguste’s card. “Hacklin and Company will try to pin this on one of our employees. I’d guess Lanerd figures Tildy Millett was the killer. Ruth Moore’s afraid Lanerd did it. She probably imagines the guard caught Mr. Giveaway with his pants down, was knifed because Lanerd feared blackmail. But the secretary did her best to sick me onto Mrs. Lanerd’s trail.”

“Tildy Millett!” Tim couldn’t think of the others; her name dazzled him. “Holy crys! Saw her ’n the moom-pix, only couple months ago. What a zizzer! A real zizzer. Why, that chick did tricks on skates I couldn’t of done if I’d—”

“—been on skates. What you know about this, Timothy?” I showed him the card.

Fessler, Auguste SS No. 624/4019 Plaza Royale No. 688 Age... 54 Nat. Hungarian (Nat. Cit. 1927) Address: 734 E. 82nd St. Phone: LO 6-2118 Married. No c. Local 901, H&RWs. U. Previously Employed: Murray Hill Hotel, 1924-8 (Henri) Hotel Lafayette, 1928-39 (Gregoire Munck) Remarks: Munck says honest and excellent waiter. Would not have let him go except for fight with meat chef. Investigated by: Sam Kerns Employed: Jan. 7,1940 Terminated...

“I dunno.” Tim shook his head. “That was Sam’s report. Sam’s on vacash.”

“You’re a big help. Ever hear talk about Auguste?” We don’t run one of those back-of-the-house spy setups where each employee is suspicious of every other one, afraid of being reported to the front office. But word does percolate, if a man’s been with the hotel ten years, as Auguste had.

“Now you mention it,” Tim closed one eye, screwed up that side of his face, “seems I recall hearing about his having’ some mix-up with one of our roast chefs, too. Shindig with a cleaver.”

“Look into it.” If Auguste was the quarrelsome type, it wouldn’t do to carry the assumption of his innocence too far. “Get Auguste up here. Hold him till I get back. Those Homicide Harris’s like nothing better than to give him the full treatment.” Put a pair of fallen arches like that through the bright-light routine in the back room, the old guy’d be apt to confess more butcheries than Swift and Amour.

Tim nodded. “Where’ll you be?”

“Steeplechase Room.”

“Hahn, hanh, hanh, hanh,” Tim panted, pinching his throat between thumb and forefinger. “Need any help down there?”

“I can do my own guzzling. Get going.”

I talked to Mona. She sent Morry up. Br’er Musselman is a mild-mannered lad, built like a golf pro, lean and leathered. Like any pro, he knows his way around. He studied the Gowriss photo. “No.”

“Show it to and fro.” I told him why.

“Why wouldn’t they tip us off?” He answered himself. “Because the dopes still think of protection men as derby hats on fat heads.”

“See what you can do without a derby,” I told him. It was five to nine when I sauntered into our photo-muraled cocktailery. A dozen people at the saddle-leather bar — about normal for during theater time Saturday night. Some were guests I recognized. One couple I didn’t know were sixtyish and gray on top; they were having a high old time, probably an anniversary of some kind. There weren’t any unattached femmes at the bar or at the tables under the illuminated pictures of jockeys being tossed off their nags’ necks or over hedges.

Mickey came over, smoothing his black lacquered hair, patting the paunch under his starchy jacket. “Yes, sir? What’ll it be, sir?” He was careful not to recognize me until he made sure I didn’t mind.

“Rum sour, Mickey.” I glanced down the bar at the only person in the place who didn’t seem to fit.

She was dressed expensively enough; the demure gray dress was a neat contrast to the maroon hat and shoes; the big straw-brim item might have been a Carnegie, Hattie. There were too many diamond and emerald rings on her fingers.

Thing that struck me most about this girl was the way she tucked her feet under the stool. Both toes hooked over and behind the rungs, crossed over each other. That plebeian grip isn’t seen much in our exclusery; more often in the dog-wagon set, where a gal gets used to catching the pillar of a counter stool with her toes.

The man with her fitted into our horsey decor all right. He was about thirty-five, maybe younger. Deep lines slashing down at sharp angles from his long thin nose to the corners of his wide, humorous mouth, plus hollows under his eyes, made it hard to guess him closer. He had a deeply cleft chin; he was so homely he was attractive. He was balding a bit in front; what there was of his hair was rusty-iron, gray and reddish-orange mixed.

His double-breasted gabardine was de rigueur; his gray suede shoes spoke of affluence; the single ring he wore was a star sapphire such as many racing men go for in a big way.

He seemed to be paying more attention to his drink than to his companion. But he had her giggling at what he was saying; I couldn’t hear him.

“Know the glitter-girl, Mickey?” I kept my voice low.

“New to me, Mister V.” He kept his voice low.

“Gentleman call her by name?”

“Might have.”

“Edie, mayhap?”

“Yes, sir. That’s her.”

“Know the man?”

“Sure. Swell joe. One of the best. Name of Keith Walch. In show biz. Tildy Millett’s manager.”

I thought the Edie person caught Mickey’s last remark, she turned, glanced up the bar in my direction. Then she nudged her companion, murmured something to him.

He looked my way, too, gave me a cool and casual onceover.

I assumed a look which denied the interest I had in his bar partner. Especially in the pair of gloves stuck in her handbag. Cotton gloves. Dark maroon.

The fingers were tucked in the pocket of the bag where they couldn’t be seen.

Chapter ten:

Spilled handbag

Rule a in the manual: Make no snap judgments. No Plaza Royale employee ever mistakes a United Nations delegate for a porter out of uniform. Though guests do, sometimes.

So I wanted to be sure I had this Edie character right before I did anything about her. She looked like a Park Avenue edition of Diamond Lil. She sounded like one of those babes who think Longchamps is French for lamb chops. But she might have been the big winner in that Stack O’ Jack contest, for all I knew.

I finished my rum sour, hunted up Zingy, told him what I wanted.

When I went back to the Steeplechase Bar, there was a vacant stool but one removed from Edie. I appropriated it, ordered, listened.

She was talking about someone Walch evidently knew.

“Why, bless y’ pore ole gin-soaked gizzard, she used to work in the line out on the Coast. She’s a fair terper. An’ photogenic as Grable. But nobody could say she’s pretty.”

Walch rattled ice in his highball glass. “Lanerd said so.”

“That’s what always threw me, sweetie. Never could figure how she hawgtied him. Sucker could have his pick of the flock.” She motioned to Mickey for a refill. “She must have something.”

Walch inspected her sardonically. “Nothing you haven’t got.”

“Should hope not.” Edie raised her tone on the last word.

“Only she doesn’t pass it around like canapés at a cocktail party.”

She thought that very comical.

The page boy came along. “Mista Walch — Mista Walch—”

Walch called, “Boy.”

The page boy turned. “Mister K. Walch? Long-distance for you, sir.”

“Sure it’s for me? Walch with a c?” The manager was puzzled. “Where’s it from?”

“Operator didn’t say, sir. Out at the public booths, sir. Ask for Operator Nine. Thank you, sir.” He pocketed his two bits, vanished.

Walch said, “Might be Nature’s gift to the shemale sex. Maybe he’s passed up the idea of a party, gone home.” He got off his stool.

Edie wriggled in aggravation. “I’m one party he better not pass up.”

When Walch had gone, I gave her the look. “Hi.”

“Hello.” No encouragement.

I moved over one stool. “Remember me, Edie?”

“No.” She was estimating what my suit had cost, how much I’d paid for the Countess Mara tie, so on. I must have come through her coin-biting test all right, for she melted enough to add, “I guess you’ve lost a little weight since I saw you, maybe.”

“What a memory! Only a quarter of an hour ago you were honey-pieing me all over the place!”

She twittered her eyelashes. “Some mistake, lovey-dove.” She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder. “My friend’ll be back in a minute—”

“No mistake. On my part. But about that arrangement with Mister Lanerd—” I shook my head. “That’s sour.”

That touched her where she was sensitive. “I don’t take any crap from a lousy errand boy! If Dow thinks he can give my girls the brush like that, he’ll find out it’s damn costive to cancel on Edie Eberlein!” She tossed her head so the big hat brim jiggled indignantly, flipped open her handbag, fished around for a compact. “I’ve gone to all that expense — he needn’t think he’s going to get off for free.”

“He wouldn’t let you hold the bag on that.” I couldn’t see any more of the gloves, but my preliminary size-up seemed to have hit it pretty close. Obviously she was one of those conventioneer madams who arranged for the cute little well-groomeds who were occasionally sneaked into better hostelries under the guise of “entertainers” for tired tycoots.

Having verified my guess that her cash deal was simply payment in advance for the “entertainers,” the routine would have been a flat “no dice.” But there was a key in her handbag. A Plaza Royale suite key.

She wouldn’t be registered. None of those alleged “agents” who furnish con girls ever check in; a group of those babes in a suite would be as noticeable as a Swede at a Senegambian wedding. So someone had given her the key. I couldn’t read the number on the square brass tag we use for double-letter duplexes, but I thought about the key Roffis would have had on him.

When Lanerd attempted to search the dead man’s pockets, I’d stopped him with that crack about police being touchy if anyone handled a cadaver. But since I’d had to unlock that closet the guard’s body was found in, I knew then that the key wouldn’t be on Roffis — unless it had been Tildy Millett who’d murdered him. Anyone else would have had to take the key from the corpse’s clothes, lock the door, and take the key away.

Edie snapped her bag shut. “I don’t want a lot of git-gat-giddle from you, errand boy. All I want is somebody to sing that old Yale song: ‘Moola, moola... moola, moola...”

“Mickey,” I called. “Repeat the prescription.”

“Right with you, Mister Vine.” He didn’t stop the rumba of the shaker.

“On the line,” Edie emphasized. “But quick.”

Walch returned, forehead furrowed, eyes resentful. “Nobody wanted me.” He stared as if I was something oozing out of a crack in the sidewalk. “I don’t understand—”

“I don’t, either,” Edie snapped. “This wisehead claims Dow isn’t interested in — my arrangements.”

“Is that right?” Walch didn’t seem disturbed at the news. “How would you know, buster?”

Mickey brought two drinks. I reached for one, to slide it over to Edie.

“Thanks, Mickey.” I grinned across at him.

“Oh!” Edie screamed; the double Martini Ed so clumsily upset slopped across the bar into her lap.

I made a grab for the glass, bumping into her.

She lurched off her stool. The handbag bounced on the floor beside the bar.

I was after it before it hit. Somehow or other it busted open. Stuff all over hell and gone. Purse, mirror, compact, lipstick, pencil, loose coins, keys. And gloves.

The square brass tag had stamped in it: 21MM.

I got that key, first.

Chapter eleven:

Key to murder suite

The gloves had plopped into a puddle of mixed gin and vermouth; they sopped up the liquor so it was impossible to tell if the finger tips had been stained or not. Before I could get my hands on any other loose items from her purse, the Eberlein babe was on me. Raking my face with her claws.

“You did that on purpose!”

There are boites where noisy altercations are no handicap; our Steeplechase isn’t one of them.

“Mickey.” I gave him the high sign, maneuvered Walch between me and the fingernails. “Ask Miss Lane to step here.”

He slid out from behind the bar.

I’d counted on La Eberlein’s being more interested in retrieving her possessions than in punishing me. She was. She and Walch scooped up money, gloves, compact, combs, pencils.

Walch muttered to her, “Don’t start anything, now!” He had a thin, strongly corded neck, the back of it mottled with red as he bent over.

She swore beneath her breath. “This guy’s no errand boy.” By then everyone in the place was watching us, listening. “He’s a — lousy house dick!”

Walch tossed the last of the purse’s scattered contents on the bar. “You take him for a Good Humor man?” He scowled at me. “Run along and lurk behind a potted palm, bud.”

“Hey!” Edie Eberlein protested. “He didn’t return everything I dropped.” She scrabbled things into her handbag.

Fran Lane came in quietly, headed over. Fran hasn’t grown bigger’n a minute in her thirty years, but she has more nerve than most tiger tamers. We don’t have enough protection work — that is, work a woman can handle — to keep her busy, so she doubles on the information desk, night side.

“Fran,” I indicated the mess the Martini had made, “lady’s dress, accidentally splashed. Will you go with her to the ladies’ lounge, see what you can do?”

“Why, certainly, Mister Vine.” Fran took Edie’s arm.

La Eberlein shook her off angrily. “Take care of myself, thank you. And I’ll send you the bill, stupid.” She glared at me.

Walch growled, “Ah, have another drink. Let it go.”

Mickey edged in behind Fran, waiting.

Fran cooed, “Why, that’s a shame. If you don’t sponge that off right away, you’ll ruin that lovely dress. Come on, honey.” She pushed Edie ahead of her so it looked as if she was tagging along behind instead of doing the propelling. Mickey, with great show of being solicitous, fell in on the other flank. Between them, she had to move.

Miss Eberlein didn’t want to go, but she wanted a public fuss even less. “Don’t go ’way, Keithy boy. Be right back.”

He grunted something uncomplimentary, climbed back on his stool. I thought he might decide to follow me out, when he saw me trailing after Edie and her escorts. But he stayed put.

Fran didn’t steer her for Ladies, of course; she herded Edie into the small cubicle just outside our credit office, a room just big enough for a desk and a couple of chairs.

“I’ll get a damp cloth, honey,” Fran offered that as an opening gambit to find out if I wanted her to stay or leave.

Edie settled it. “You know what you can do with your damp cloth!” She flashed one indignant glance around her. “Haven’t you caused me trouble enough?” She began to raise her voice. “Give me the things you spilled out of my bag, this instant, or I’ll give you some publicity the Plaza Royale won’t forget in a hurry!”

Fran heeled the door shut.

I held out the 21MM key. “This was in your bag, Miss Eberlein, but it’s hotel property. Only lent to patrons temporarily. Are you registered here?”

“You know damn well I’m not,” she blazed. “That key was given to me by the person who rents the suite. You give it back, now!”

That stopped me. She did know Tildy Millett’s manager, might know the skater. If the key’d come into Edie’s possession legitimately, it might have no connection with the dead man up on the twenty-first. But there was that locked closet, plus the possibility the key might have been the one taken from Roffis. The key seemed to be the meat of the matter.

“We have to have a strict rule about keys,” I said. “The only time we allow them to be used by any other than the registered patron is when a Key Permission card is signed and left at the main desk. If such a card is on file, of course—” I jingled the tag. “Fran, will you check on that?”

“Right away.” Fran went out, left the door open.

Edie seemed flustered. “I don’t know — about any card.”

I followed it up. “The hotel is anxious for its patrons to have a good time while here. But we’re only concerned about our guests, naturally. The anxiety doesn’t extend to paid entertainers, f’rexamp.”

“No law says you can’t invite friends to your suite.” She was ready to go to bat for her racket, so ready that I couldn’t imagine her having been involved in a stabbing. She’d have been more interested in getting away from there.

Zingy, halfway across the lobby, caught sight of me, made vigorous pantomime of the letter T.

I nodded that I got it; Tim wanted me.

But Zingy hurried over, making a spinning motion with his right forefinger — the hustle sign.

I went to the door. “Excuse me one second, Miss Eberlein.” I caught hold of the jamb with my left hand, about head-high.

“Trouble a-bubbling,” the bell captain said softly.

“Always is, my night off. What now?”

“Tim, up in the Crystal Room. He’s looking for somebody, says you know who.”

“And?”

“He hollers the law’s up there hunting for the same gent, so will you kindly hop up quick-like?”

A little twist-of-the-wrist-ing and the face of my Longines was a reasonable facsimile of a mirror; good enough so I could see a big maroon hat receding toward the inner door going through to the credit office.

“Better, I guess. Find Mister Duman, tell him I’m going up to the sixth.” I moved toward the main desk, so if they shunted her away in Credit, she’d still have a chance to scamper out through the door where I’d been standing.

Zingy went. Fran Lane came back. “You didn’t think there was any Key Permission, did you?”

“No,” I admitted. “Isn’t even any permittee.”

She peered. The little office was empty.

“Too bad.” I smiled. “She must have slid out through the credit office.”

Fran nodded solemnly. “You want me to look for her, but not too hard.”

“Not unless she has some of her wares with her.”

“Flesh peddler?”

“Yair. You had her right, didn’t you? She had all the earmarks.”

She laughed. “Some of those convention cut-ups, off the legal leash?”

“You’d make some man very happy,” I told her, “if you didn’t know so much about sex.”

The service elevator zipped me up to the sixth. The Crystal Room was thick with smoke, loud with chatter and clatter.

Our caravanserai is too high-priced to cater to run-of-the-mine conventions. But we take a few where the foregatherers are not the type who go for snake-dancing in the lobby. Doctors, scientists, economists, upper-bracketeers, mostly. The bunch in the Crystal Room were pollsters, the boys who guess ’em wrong at election time. Public pulse-feelers. That’s what the publicity stated.

Possibly a hundred left in the room. Most of them clustering at tables or huddling in groups. At the far end, a tall, high-domed individual up at the speakers’ table was urging those present to “get behind this thing solidly — back it with your utmost energy and enthusiasm—” I didn’t listen.

Armand was in charge. Emile hovered around the door to the banquet kitchen to see everything went smooth and serene. There were about thirty mess-jacketed waiters pouring demitasses, passing coronas, collecting spumone saucers, so on. I didn’t see Auguste.

Tim wasn’t visible. But Hacklin was. Giving Armand that elbow grip. Our dapper-dan banquet maître didn’t care for any part of it. I could interpret his Gallic gestures clear across the Crystal Room.

I went over.

Armand caught sight of me. “Meestair Vine, s’il vous plait!”

Hacklin let go the maître’s arm. “C’mon, Smart Stuff. Where’s this Auguste fellow, hah? We’re not kidding.”

“I know you’re not.” I wondered if he’d run into Auguste in 21MM. Likely he wouldn’t have, if he didn’t stay after noon and didn’t come on before midnight; Auguste only worked the noon to eight o’clock shift, ordinarily. “We’re trying to locate him.”

“Yeah? Downstairs they told me he’d quit and gone home. Then I hear he’s doin’ extra duty tonight.”

“Sometimes Armand lets them do that,” I explained, “to earn an extra buck.”

Armand gesticulated. “Was ici. Is gone.”

“Don’t worry about it, maître.” I asked Hacklin, “What’s the big sweat?”

“See this?” He thrust a paper at me. A newspaper clipping headed Numerology. Under it was:

Following are the most significant numbers of the past thirty days. The figures in the third column indicate the number of times a certain number, played straight, has appeared since January, 1950. The figures in the last column indicate the number of times other combinations of the same number repeated.

Below it were figures:

and a lot more.

“So?” I knew it was one of those daily tab features for the suckers who throw their corn away on the numbers game.

“So we found it in Auguste’s locker!” Hacklin stuck his face close to mine.

I said I didn’t suppose more than three or four hundred thousand other guys would have clipped the same column.

“All right, Smart Stuff. We know the guy we’re after is mixed up in the policy angle. And there’s one other little thing that may interest you. This Auguste changed his black waiter coat to the monkey coats these fellows wear.” He jerked a thumb at the Plaza Royale’s gorgeous gold-braided mess jackets, only used to put on the dog at exclusive banquets.

“You found something in his other coat?” I didn’t like the ugly look in Hacklin’s eye.

“On it! On the sleeve. Sticky goo. I scraped off some with my knife. Blood. Yeah. What d’ya know about that!”

Across the hall I saw Auguste. He was coming toward us, straight toward Hacklin.

Chapter twelve:

Doorway to death

In the killercycle draymas, the criminal is just a stupid-though-crafty rat who eventually gets caught by the steel-trap mind of the detective. Nobody but the snoopersleuth is permitted to have a mind like a steel trap. Everybody else wanders around in a daze suspecting obviously innocent parties, until snap goes the trap of the mastermind. I wish I could operate like that sometime.

However, most of the criminals security men deal with are slick articles. Key workers, who hang around the information desk until they spot a guest’s name and room number, wait for him to go out, then step up, ask for his key, and go up and rifle his room; corridor cats who prowl along until they see an open door with a maid racking up, then boldly walk in and make like they’re the guests; crooks like that aren’t so stupid.

In the case of 21MM, anyone who could get into a guarded suite, murder the guard, and get away without being seen or heard, was a cool and calculating head. Auguste didn’t fit the picture.

Neither did it seem reasonable that a waiter who had the nerve to go up against a cleaver-equipped chef would be the sort to stab any man in the back. And even if Auguste had gone berserk, he’d never have returned to the scene of his crime and blandly admitted he was looking for the weapon he’d misplaced.

But if Hacklin waltzed him downtown to one of those high-pressure tête-à-têtes, by the time it was discovered the stains were only steak gravy, it’d be too late to repair the bad publicity. So I aimed at sidetracking Hacklin long enough to switch Auguste downstairs, get the truth out of him without scaring him out of his wits.

He hurried across the Crystal Room, straight for us. Armand tugged at my sleeve, trying to get my attention.

“Meestair Vine, Auguste—”

“Don’t melt your mustache, Armand.” By the speakers’ table, at the far end of the raised platform, I saw a blond crew cut and a white tie with Roy Yaker’s genial puss sandwiched in between. He was being buttonholed by an individual who had his back to me; the other man wasn’t wearing tails or tux. All I could make out clearly at that distance was the sparkle of a ring on his right flipper. It shone like a star sapphire.

I rattled the key I’d taken from Edie, lowered my voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Hacklin, here’s something more to the point than any waiter’s sleeve.” I half turned as if to keep Armand from overhearing; all I was after was to make Hacklin twist around, away from the oncoming Auguste.

“Where’d you get that?” Hacklin reached for it.

“Took it away from a sizzle sister down in the Steeplechase Bar just now.” I let him have the key. “A Miss Edie Eberlein. Claimed the key was given to her by Tildy Millett.”

“Yuh? You hold her?” The D.A.’s man was interested, all right.

Auguste bustled up. “Mister Fine, I am told—”

I waved him away. “See I’m busy, Fessler? Ask Tim Piazolle about it!”

“But Mister Fine, Mister Piazolle, he—”

“I’ll talk to you down in my office, Fessler.” I ignored him, turned back to Hacklin, who was observing Auguste suspiciously. “I didn’t have any charge against this zizzer, so I couldn’t hold her. But she was with Tildy Millett’s manager, gent name of Keith Walch. Thought you might want to question him.” Auguste raised his eyebrows and his shoulders, drooped the corners of his mouth, gazed at Armand, turned on his heel, walked away with his arms bent at the elbows, palms upturned.

“Walch, huh.” Hacklin decided he had no call to inquire into my business with any waiter named Fessler. “Where’s he?”

“Over there.” I pointed. “Talking to the big bucko in the soup and fish. Big lad’s name is Yaker. He’s running this kaffee klatch. Lanerd was to speak at the dinner.” If Hacklin inferred that I’d trailed Walch up to the Crystal Room, why should I have set him straight?

“Walch might know where his skater is.” Hacklin was mollified. “But put the clamps on that waiter, hear? We sent the coat down to Broome Street for tests. If it turns out the same type blood as Herb’s, I want five minutes with that son of a bitch before I turn him in downtown.” He stalked toward Yaker and Walch.

Armand puffed out his cheeks, blew out his breath with a soft hissing.

“Armand,” I said. “You are dumb.”

“M’sieu?” He patted his toupee, agitated.

“Deaf. Dumb. Blind. You know nothing about nothing.” I knuckled him gently in the short ribs. “N’est-ce pas?”

“Ah-ho!” His eyes became very round. “That is how it is, that way?”

“Just like that.” I went out to the check-off room, through the serving-pantry, into the banquet kitchen where the smell of quail Montmorency and sweetbreads Emile made me realize it was about the time I’d have been eating a frankfurter, if I’d gone to the Garden.

Tim wasn’t around. Neither was Auguste.

When the service car dropped me at the third and I went into my office, they were both there.

Tim had to explain why he’d missed Auguste up in the banquet kitchen. Auguste insisted on relating how he had learned “Mister Fine” was looking for him, how he’d hastened to locate me soon’s he knew I wanted him.

I told Tim what I wanted him to do about the maids, bellmen, porters, electricians, waiters, and valets who might have been on the twenty-first within the last four hours. Then I took Auguste into my private cubby.

Boiled down, what he said was that he’d served early dinner for Miss Millett, guest, and maid. Around six, that was. Vichysoisse, sole bonne femme, bifteck bearnaise, salade avocado, pêche Melba, café. He was especially careful with the order; Miss “Marino” took care of him excellently in the matter of lagniappe.

The guest had been Roffis. With the guard there had been not exactly trouble, but an argument only. “What was the matter, Auguste?”

“The filet, it was the finest, well aged and exzellently charcoaled, but this boozhwah claimed it was tough, sztringy. I do not tell him he is probably not uszed to such tender cuts, but this I think to myzelf. Iz not the firszt time we disagree about the meals, Mister Fine.”

“Any other arguments at the table?”

“Szome talk about a fisit from Mister Lanerd’s wife — diszagreeableness, pozzibly. Nikky, the maid, she was angry about it. Miss Marino did not szeem so angry, thoughtful only. Roffis, he did not expressz opinion.” About seven, they finished. Auguste began to take tables away. After the meal, Miss Marino had gone into her bedroom with Nikky. Roffis took his time about finishing his dessert, razzed Auguste some more, went into his room.

As Auguste was clearing away, Miss Marino had come back to the living-room. Then the maid had returned, too. Both appeared to be upset. While Auguste was busy rolling the hot-table out into the hall, Roffis had re-entered the living-room. He exchanged a few words in an undertone with Miss Marino, hurried into the girl’s bedroom. This was something Auguste had not seen him do before, on any of the occasions when the waiter’d been in the suite.

When Auguste got out to the corridor, began stacking dishes on the tables, he noticed the door to Miss Marino’s bedroom was slightly open. He paid no particular attention to this. But a minute later, after he’d made another trip to the living-room and back to the corridor, a man rushed out of the bedroom, bumping into him, nearly upsetting the hot-table.

He had seized Auguste’s arm to steady himself, hurried away down the corridor before Auguste realized it wasn’t Roffis.

Auguste hadn’t seen the man’s face clearly, partly because he’d been bending over and had been rattled by the unexpected encounter, partly because Auguste, though extremely shortsighted, couldn’t wear his glasses on duty. The Plaza Royale doesn’t go for spectacled waiters.

So he couldn’t describe the man. All he had actually seen was a vague blur of a face. All he could say for sure was the man wore a light suit, cream-colored with chocolate checks, something a Londoner might possibly sport.

He couldn’t give more than the fuzziest description of the man. Medium height. Average build. Neither especially light or dark. Indeterminate age. He was certain it was a man. That was about all he was sure of.

Auguste had taken his tables along to the service elevator and thought no more about it. It was “quite pozzible, yes,” that this nondescript individual had wiped a hand on Auguste’s sleeve.

I’d gotten to the point of explaining to Auguste that in all probability he’d had his hands on a murderer — or the other way round — when there was a pounding on my door.

And Hacklin’s voice demanding admittance.

Chapter thirteen:

Diamond-studded compact

“Just a minute,” I called.

Auguste looked worried. He whispered, “Mister Fine, I haf my perzsonal reasons for not wiszhing to be infestigated. By you, I don’t mind. But not outsziders.”

I motioned him to follow me into the lost-and-found room, which opens off the opposite side of my six-by-ten cubbyhole. When I got him out there among the shelves loaded with umbrellas, slippers, girdles, bathrobes, so on, I told him to go down to the employees’ smoking-room, wait for me. I wasn’t sure whether that crack about not minding my looking into his affairs was complimentary or not.

“Thank you szo ferry much, Mister Fine.” He stepped into the corridor, around the corner and out of sight from Hacklin. I went back through my private cubicle, shut the doors, let the Prosecutor’s assistant in.

Hacklin wouldn’t take the chair I offered. After he shut the door, he planted his shoulders against it. “That Walch lad gimme a somewhat different story than you handed me about the Eberlein girl.”

“How different?”

“Says she’s a legitimate agent for chorines and models. He arranged for her to supply entertainers for Mister Lanerd’s party after the dinner tonight. Claims Mister Lanerd and his wife recommended her. Walch says he was waiting down in the bar with her to collect his commission in advance. You come in, put the pinch on the Eberlein girl, take her into the credit office. That’s the last he saw of her. He went up to the banquet room to find out where the party was supposed to take place, so he could tell the girls where to go. He don’t know anything about the key; maybe Tildy Millett did give it to her.”

“Little inaccurate in spots,” I objected. “But close enough.”

“You manage to fuggle things up, all along the line. You had this girl, you lose her. You have this waiter, he comes right up to you there in the banquet room; you know I want to put him through the hopper, still you send him away. I had Schneider down in the locker room; he found out the waiter’s name is Auguste Fessler.”

“Why don’t you run me downtown,” I laid it on with a trowel, “so I can tell your boss who’s doing the real fuggling?”

“Tell me.” Hacklin came to the desk, planted both hands on it, leaned over unpleasantly close.

“Sure. He sends a couple of his Punch and Booty boys up here to keep a tight watch on an important witness. Because they wouldn’t work with our security office, a dozen people wander in and out of the supposedly guarded suite every day. Not all Plaza Royale people, either. We lease out the valet concession, f’rinst, and the valet’s messenger boys have been up there.”

“Wasn’t a question of keeping people out — what we were after was to see those who came in.”

“Happen to see a joe wearing a loud, light-colored suit? Cream-colored, maybe? Might have had chocolate checks? He was in 21MM about the time Roffis must have been knifed.”

He squinted. “Never mind his suit. What’d he look like?”

“Auguste couldn’t describe him. Auguste can’t see a fly on the end of his nose, without glasses. Our waiters aren’t allowed to wear glasses.”

Veins in Hacklin’s forehead stood out like small purplish worms; his eyes had that old hard-boiled-egg look once more. “If he couldn’t see any better’n that, how’d he know this guy was in Miss Millett’s rooms?”

“Guy bumped into him. Coming out of the bedroom where we found your partner. Grabbed Auguste’s sleeve.”

“Yeah? An’ he just can’t tell what the fella looked like, huh? Wait’ll I get this Fessler alone for a few minutes. He’ll begin to remember things.”

“He would. He’d even make up things to remember.” I’ve known it to happen often enough. “If you wouldn’t put the arm on him, I’d help you to get hold of him so you could question him here.”

“Where is he?”

“No arrest?”

“Look.” His jaw jutted out like a comic-book detective’s. “If he confesses, I can’t—”

“If you’re still sticking to the idea he was hired by some gambling syndicate to put the dot on Roffis, you couldn’t be wronger.”

“All right.” It was a grudging concession. “Where is he?” Hacklin didn’t like the deal much.

Neither did I, but it was the best I could do, off the cuff. “Waiters’ smoking-room. Basement.”

On the way down in the service car, Hacklin told me they were all balled up now because they couldn’t locate Lanerd.

“Thought he was at the studio.”

“He wasn’t. Never went there. Charley talked to the producer of the Stack O’ Jack thing, fella name MacGregory. MacGregory talked to Lanerd on the phone after the show but hadn’t seen his boss at all. I called Mrs. Lanerd — he has a place out at Manhasset — but he hadn’t gone home; she hadn’t heard from him, seemed kinda worried about him.”

“Everybody’s worried about him,” I said. “His wife, his secretary.”

“Worried? I think she’s crazy about him.”

“No!”

“Yuh.” He didn’t take kindly to sarcasm. “She acts more upset than a secretary would, simply because he doesn’t call her up to let her know what’s cooking.”

“Maybe she figures he eloped with Tildy Millett.”

He moved aside to let a couple of buckets of champagne get around him. “What I’d like to know is where Lanerd found out she was heading for Kentucky.”

The waiters’ recreation room is off in the corner of the service basement, beyond the silver-cleaning drums. I could tell there was something unusual afoot before we reached it. Three of our main-dining-room garçons blocked the doorway, watching something in the smoking-room. None of them spoke to me because they didn’t know Hacklin.

What they were watching was Auguste, in shirtsleeves, shorts, and socks. Practically in tears, besides. He stood, shamefaced, beside the table where the boys sometimes played gin rummy or tarot. Schneider stood beside him, feeling in the toe of one of Auguste’s shoes. The mess jacket hung on a chair back. Auguste’s trousers lay rumpled on the table.

Auguste saw me at the same time Schneider noticed Hacklin. They began simultaneously.

“Mister Fine, oh, pleasze!”

“Hi, Byrd. I guess this does it.”

I touched Hacklin’s arm. “The search routine is all right. But no vile durance. Remember?”

Hacklin didn’t answer. He gawked at the glittering gadget Schneider juggled in his palm. A compact. But something ultra. Engine-turned platinum, the turnings like the figures fancy skaters make on ice. Studded with diamonds. Sparklers around the circular rim. More glitter forming a nice neat T in the center. Quite an item.

“He had it in his sock.” Schneider flipped the back of his hand at Auguste’s middle. Auguste practically jumped out of his socket. “Good thing I thought of comin’ back here, looking for the crut.”

Auguste cried, “Mister Fine, Mister Fine, pleasze! Miss Millett, she gifts me this. A preszent, yesz. I tell him so, but he will not belief!”

Hacklin grinned at me with no humor whatever. “That deal we made. I guess you won’t mind if we call that off now?”

Chapter fourteen:

High jinks in no. 2010

That was a bad spot.

I knew they had to take Auguste. They’d have been derelict if they didn’t. Presumably neither Hacklin nor Schneider knew about Auguste’s having quarreled with Roffis. Or his background of belligerency.

Still, the steak knife, the blood on his sleeve, that ridiculous numbers clipping, they were enough. Even without this compact. The compact wasn’t precisely the sort of trivia a guest hands out as cumshaw. More likely the kind of article included on some jewelry insurance inventory.

So Auguste was in for it. No matter what I did.

But a security man stands or falls, depending on whether he has his staff with him or agin him. We’re hired to keep order in a city, a vertical city to be sure, but one with more transients moving in and out every day than, say, a city like Northampton, Massachusetts. Yet we don’t really have any power or authority. No night sticks or hip holsters. It’s all done with mirrors. We have to depend on employees for information and backing. No protection man rates that sort of support unless the staff knows he’ll go to bat for an employee if and when necessary.

So I couldn’t just let them walk out with Auguste. In five minutes the bunch on the grapevine would have spread the word all over the house.

“Auguste,” I said, “when’d she give you this?”

“This efening, Mister Fine. While I am bringing in the tables.” Shame and resentment made his face older; standing there with his bony shanks and knobby knees showing below the draggling, striped shorts, he was a miserable specimen. “With efery Tower room-serfice order, we are always szending a rose. But Miss Millett she does not like roszes. For her I haf perzonally arrange with each tray a camellia, pink. Always she is ferry pleaszed, she mentions how pleaszed. Tonight she says she may soon be going away — and for my thoughtfulnesz, is there anything she could do for me?”

“Come on!” Schneider threw the pants at him. “Climb into those. Le’s get going. You c’n spill that mahooly downtown—”

I interrupted. “Take your time, Auguste.” It wasn’t a necessary remark; his fingers trembled so he couldn’t fasten the buttons. I was talking for the benefit of the boys in the doorway. “Go on. She asked what kind of gratuity would suit you.”

“No szir, pleasze, she did not. I told her I would prefer zum little trinket by which to remember a moszt gracious lady.”

Hacklin laughed harshly. “You certainly picked yourself a cheap little trinket. Musta cost a thousand, at least. Who you think you kiddin’? You stole this compact!”

“You haf only to ask her.” Auguste got the trousers on with difficulty; he had the shakes but good. “Myself, when she goes to her bag and brings out this,” he pointed a bony finger at the compact, “I am flibber-gaszted. It is too much, I proteszt, but she inzists it is szomething for which she will have no more use and she wiszhes me to take it. So I thank her many times and I do take it. When I change into messz jacket, the compact makes bulge in pantz pocket so I put it where I keep my wallet moszt always when I am on serfice.” I suppose Hacklin and Schneider thought that was just so much parsley, though, remembering what Elsie Dowd had said about Miss Marino, I was ready to believe it. Until we could check on it. As for keeping it in his sock, that’s where any waiter would conceal a valuable.

But there were ugly implications. If Auguste had overheard some remark about her clearing out, as a result of being scared of Mrs. Lanerd or of Al Gowriss, he might have decided to make a grab while the grabbing wouldn’t be noticed. Or at least when she wouldn’t be likely to come back for the stolen article.

Put it another way, the compact might have been payment for overlooking something Tildy Millett didn’t want talked about. An affair with Lanerd, maybe. Or a man’s body in a closet.

Schneider took the mess jacket off the chair, held it out for Auguste to put on. “If she gave it to you, you’ll get it back, jughead. If she didn’t, you won’t get back, yourself. C’mon, now.”

“Auguste,” I said, “how long have you known Miss Marino’s identity?”

“Crysake,” Hacklin muttered. “That’s right. The name was never supposed to be mentioned while any hotel people were around. How ’bout that, huh?”

Auguste sputtered. “When she firszt — when she gafe me the compact, so I would know who I should remember — she told me then, but I muszt promise — now I haf broken—” He was broken up about it, all right. “I do not wiszh cause any trouble for her—”

I gave him the big pat on the shoulder, took his arm. “You’re not, Auguste. You’re helping. Come along with us; we’ll get her to verify the gift; everything’ll be hokaydory.” I led him out of the recreation room before Schneider could do more than grab his other arm. Hacklin tagged along behind as we went through the door.

I spoke to the listening group of waiters. “Don’t talk about this until Auguste gets back, a’right, boys?”

“Absotively,” they agreed. “Sure thing, Mister V.”

“You gonna hock that an’ buy a chicken farm, ’Guste?”

He sniggered feebly. It made him feel a little less as if he was being marched off to a dungeon.

Schneider didn’t enthuse about my leading role. When we got out to the clanking silver-polishing drums, he growled, “Never mind comin’ any farther, Vine.”

“You couldn’t find your way down here. You’d wind up in the glass-sterilizer room. Auguste,” I went on quickly, “these men will try to hold you for stealing that compact. What they expect to do is link you up with the murder. I know you didn’t do it. I’ll get you out. Keep that left hand up and your chin in.”

“Yesz.” He smiled wanly. “I truszt you, Mister Fine.”

Last I saw of him, they were shouldering him out through the employees’ exit. A fall guy. Yair. A poor, old helpless — no, he wasn’t going to be helpless. Auguste was my responsibility.

When I got back to my office, things were really popping. Reidy was there, solemn and uncomfortable. He was relaying word from the hotel’s high command. Evidently Hacklin had burned up the phone lines talking to the D.A.; Reidy was instructed to inform me that I was to co-operate fully with the Prosecutor’s droll legmen, that otherwise I was to be summarily suspended, without pay continuance or pension rights. Reidy was glum.

“Think nothing of it.” I gave him the carefree grin. “I’m practically a member of the D.A.’s crew. Everything’s going fine. Except we don’t know where Tildy M. is. Or Dow Lanerd. They’ve just carted Auguste to the hoosegow. And this Gowriss goon may be prowling the stairs right now.”

Reidy said dourly, “Sooner or later the murder is going to break in the papers; that’s the part I’m not looking forward to.” He tossed an envelope on my desk. “That was in the 21MM box. I told them to switch any calls to you and send all her messages up here.”

I opened it. On a sheet of crested Plaza Royale stationery, suite quality, was lettered in neat capitals:

T.M.:—SEVEN FOR A SECRET BUT NEVER FORGET FOUR Lx

“Is there a cryptographer in the house?” I read it again, getting the same result as the first time. Absolute zero.

“Does read like code,” Reidy admitted. “Guess we better pass it on to the DAides.”

“Let me mull it over.” I put it in my pocket. “I’m a fair-to-middling muller, if I have plenty of time.” The phone rang. It was Fran Lane.

“Nothing important, Mister V. Only a pair of that Eberlein dizzy’s mannequins — isn’t that a sweet name for ’em — are up to no good.”

“Where?”

“They went up to the twenty-first. I went with ’em. After I keyed myself into an empty, they trotted down the stairs to twenty. I listened around. They’re in 2010-12.”

“Who’s the gay dog?”

“Gentleman from Philadelphia. Roy T. Yaker.”

“Well, well. He’s the poll expert. Probably feeling their pulses, Fran. I’ll take care of it.”

Chapter fifteen:

Ear to the wall

Now and again I meet some youngster who learns I’m a chief security officer. Usually he’s cram-full of notions about the fine points of sleuthing as reported by the ingenious gents who write up crime stories in the lurid mags with Real and Official and Inside in their titles. The kid’s usually very disappointed in me.

I can’t do any of the incredible things those clever cusses find so simple. According to their modest self-revelations, at any rate. One of ’em finds it easy to read a murderer’s lips fifty feet across a gloomy, smoke-shrouded barroom, thus “overhearing” details of some gory mayhem. Another has no difficulty searching a criminal’s eyes until he discovers the crook’s innermost secrets, turns him over to the stern hand of judge and jury. One expert claims to have broken a tough case by “mentalizing” a suspect’s mind. Whatever that is.

Many’s the time I’ve been disappointed in myself at not being able to put on such a performance. But it wouldn’t do to read guests’ minds. Not around the Plaza Royale.

My limitations force me to use the old-fashioned or garden variety of detection. When necessary to get the low-down on a party, I try to get close enough to hear what they’re saying. Or doing. As f’rexamp, outside the 2010 door of Mister Roy Yaker.

I didn’t have to lay my face against the panel. Or kneel to put my ear to the bottom of the door. I just lit a cigarette, leaned against the wall, and listened.

“Don’t rush me, dahrrling. I’m the shy type hates to be hurried.” The voice belonged to a honey in her late ’teens. Not shrill but penetrating, considering that hotel doors are purposely never soundproofed. “Where’s your biggie boy fren, dahrrling? You said he’d be here.”

Another more subdued feminine chime-in: “Yes, Mister Yaker, when’s Dow Lanerd coming? Or are we going somewhere to meet him? I’m just dying to meet that man. What is it they call him in the papers? Mister Giveaway? When is he—”

“Dow’s not going to be able to make it, kiddies.” Yaker, trying to quiet them. “We’ll have just as much fun—”

They put up a protest. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known Mister Lanerd wasn’t going to be here; that’s absolutely the only reason I—”

“Edie promised we’d meet Mister Giveaway; I’d counted on asking him some very important questions. Now you call him up, Roy boy, tell him we’re seething with—”

“He can’t come.” Yaker, again. “I just did talk to him on the phone.”

“You did not, either.”

“You don’t even know Dow Lanerd, betcha.”

“That was just a come-on.” They really went after Crew Cut.

“He’s home and he’s going to stay home. He’s not feeling up to par—”

“That old gag!” The second girl was contemptuous.

“It’s the truth.” Yaker giggled. “He’s suffering from an ingrowing wife. No fooling. That’s on the level. Call up his house in Manhasset, you don’t believe me.”

They mewed unhappily. The first girl had a suggestion.

“Maybe if I talk to him” — she put the old oomph into her voice to illustrate how she would lure him — “he’d change his mind.”

“He probably would,” Yaker agreed. “But you wouldn’t change Mrs. Lanerd’s mind. He got in some kind of girl jam just recently; she’s keeping a pretty close watch on him. He doesn’t even want his secretary to know he’s home. Now, I’ll tell you what — there’s a friend of mine, one of the most important statisticians in the country—”

I left while he was still selling it. It would be easy enough to get the girls out of the hotel without incurring the guest’s animosity; I wasn’t too much concerned about his amorous tendencies: those kids weren’t schoolgirl innocents; nothing more would happen than what they’d bargained for. But I was interested in what he’d said about Dow Lanerd’s being at home.

Yaker knew Lanerd; the girls had been arranged for with Lanerd; from what little I knew of Mister Giveaway, he wouldn’t pass up a party like that without letting Yaker know he wouldn’t be there. That remark about Lanerd’s having spouse trouble fitted in with what Ruth Moore had said. Maybe the head man of the Stack O’ Jack show had gone home without notifying Hacklin in order to avoid any further hassle with Mrs. Lanerd about being in Tildy’s suite. Or maybe he wanted to talk to his lawyers before he had a second session with Hacklin & Company.

One thing seemed clear enough. If anybody would know where the skating star had decamped to, he’d be the one. He’d have to know, or his television show would blow up in his face.

I had to get hold of Tildy Millett to clear Auguste, to knock down that inside-job obsession of Hacklin’s. I had to reach her before Hacklin did, too. Or they’d stop her from saying so much as hello to me.

Fran was down in the lobby, keeping an eye out for more of Edie’s sugarplums. I complimented her on tracing the first pair to Yaker’s room, told her to get Morry, send him up with that one-two punch: Guests in the adjoining room are being disturbed, sir, and, if that didn’t send the cuties scampering, five minutes later: There’s a man down in the lobby claiming his sister is up here in your suite, sir. We’re trying to keep him from coming up, but—

Fran said, “You won’t be around?”

I told her where I’d be. Signaled Zingy, none of his fancy manipulations, just the ancient crook-of-the-finger come-hither.

“What’ll it be, Mister V?”

I described the cream-colored suit Auguste had told about.

“Yeah.” Zingy laid one finger alongside his nose, Santa Claus style. Denoting intense concentration, no doubt. “I remember some customer — wearing a piece of custard pie like that. Lemme see, now—” He stared at the pattern in the carpet. He examined the shimmering chandelier which distinguishes the lobby. He gave up.

I was glad to find Auguste hadn’t been making it up; had been able to see the suit if he couldn’t delineate the wearer. But it wasn’t good news otherwise. The man wouldn’t have been Al Gowriss, the narcotic addict. Zingy wouldn’t ever have forgotten a face like that.

The individual who’d wiped his bloody fingers on Auguste’s sleeve had either been someone so ordinary, so average, so unworthy of notice that Zingy couldn’t pick him out of his memory file. Or he could be someone Zingy’d seen so often he’d been more impressed by the suit than by its owner.

Zingy was distressed. “I’ll wreck my brain, Mister V. Maybe it’ll come to me.”

“A week’s vacation pay’ll come with it, if it does.” I went out of the air-conditioning into the good smells of New York on a summer night — exhaust fumes, flowers in the Park, pigeons, the dejected horses between the shafts of the Victorias across the square.

I asked Ike, our admiral at the Fifth Avenue entrance, about the cream-colored suit. He couldn’t remember anything like that.

When I got my car rolling in the East Side express highway, I batted the whole business around my brain cells without getting any flash of intuitive brilliance.

Tildy Millett might have run out on Hacklin because she was afraid of being murdered by Al Gowriss or someone the killer hired. But Lanerd wasn’t in any danger from that source. Or was he?

Right down at the bottom of it, the thing that didn’t ring right to me was Roffis’s being knifed while Tildy Millett got away scot-free. Yet if Auguste had told it straight, the killer must have been in the suite with her immediately after murdering her guard. Only the maid, Nikky, would have been with her. But why, after having stuck his neck into a noose, hadn’t the man in the cream-colored suit used the steak knife on Tildy, to keep her from testifying regarding Johnny the Grocer’s death?

I was still chewing on that one when I slid over the Whitestone Bridge, along the Parkway bordering the Sound. By the time I slewed off the Shore Drive, between the huge stone gates of Chateau Lanerd, I was no closer to a satisfactory conclusion.

Dow Lanerd had himself fixed up right, out there on Manhasset Bay. A hundred acres, maybe more. All lawns and shrubbery, rose gardens and stables, little groves of blue spruce and winding paths. The house itself, looming against the stars and the sprinkle of moving lights out on the bay, seemed half as big as the hotel.

It was Norman French, massive gray stone with great wide doorways and tall, arch-topped windows. Lamplight showed through a dozen of the first-floor windows.

I parked, marched up broad stone steps, pulled at a knocker. A butler who gave the impression he didn’t care to have dealings with anyone below the rank of viscount said, “Mister Lanerd is not at home, sir. Your name, sir?”

“Gilbert Vine. Mrs. Lanerd in?”

His eyes roved past me down toward the white pier projecting out into the bay. “Was she expecting you, sir?”

“Probably not.”

“I am sorry, sir. She is not at home.”

I thanked him, went down the steps slowly until he closed the door. Then I sauntered off in the direction of the pier as if I’d been there before.

I expected him to be watching me as well as he could; certainly he’d notice I didn’t switch on my car lights. But probably he wouldn’t follow me.

The path led down an easy slope to a boathouse beside the pier. I kept on the grass, off the gravel.

When I got where I could see the pier, I could make out two figures silhouetted against the reflected glow from the water.

A woman in slacks and halter. I couldn’t see what the fellow was wearing. But he had his arm around her shoulder, holding her as they strolled toward me. I kept still, when he got near enough for me to hear, I had another one of those jolts.

“... make an end to it, once and for all, Marge,” he was saying, “then we’ll get married.”

Chapter sixteen:

Lowdown on a Casanova

Lurking is something I’m clumsy at. I wouldn’t look right in one of those cloak-and-dagger outfits. Besides I doubt if espionage agents get much dope by sneaking around in the shadows.

So I used my cigarette lighter; it must have showed up about like a firefly against that immense, dark lawn. But they saw it, stopped their intimate chatter, clicked on a light bracketed from a stanchion of the pier.

“Dow? That you?” She had an agreeably soft voice; I couldn’t tell whether the curious breathless quality was her normal way of speaking, or whether she was afraid.

I put an inquiry into my “Mrs. Lanerd?” though of course I’d seen her often in the Calypso Room with Mr. Giveaway.

Glowing — that was the word for Margery Lanerd. Not beautiful. Blue eyes, an electric blue that blazed hotly under the stark brightness of the pier light. A red-and-freckles, tomboyish, sunburnished face with a mobile mouth and expressive eyebrows that seemed to be always in motion. The chestnut mane, caught around her forehead with a blue ribbon, sleeking down to bare shoulders, reminded me of coppery colts in the paddock sunlight at Belmont. She held herself tense; her left hand pressed against her slim, bare midriff. Keeping her emotions under tight control.

“Did you want to see me?” Fear, close to the surface.

I said I’d driven out from New York to see her husband; the servant had told me Mister Lanerd wasn’t home; could she suggest where I might get hold of him?

No. She could not. What was my business with him?

“Saw your husband at the Plaza Royale tonight, Mrs. Lanerd, I’m Gilbert Vine, security chief at the hotel, and a little matter has come up—” I left it vague enough to cover anything.

She drew in her breath sharply. To hide her surprise or give herself time to think she introduced the husky customer in slacks and screamy-striped blazer.

“Jefford MacGregory, Mister Vine. Mister MacGregory is with Lanerd, Kenson and Fullbright.”

“Oh — Stack O’ Jack Show.” I smiled as if I’d never missed the program, knew all about him. It wasn’t hard to make a couple of close guesses about him.

MacGregory was thick-necked and bull-chested with big-muscled arms and legs; there was a slight indication of a paunch that said he did himself well at the board. He had a huge dome head, slightly bald in front but making up for it by a black spade beard. His face was Falstaffian with round, ingenuous eyes and a mouth that could have been humorous. It wasn’t, right then.

“You’re not the one who called me up — at the studio?”

I said no, I wasn’t. But the other guy and I wanted to locate Mister Lanerd for the same reason.

Marge Lanerd’s breathlessness was even more noticeable. “He telephoned me, too. Said there’d been some trouble.”

“Yair.” I couldn’t decide whether either of them knew about the murder. “Trouble. About one of Miss Millett’s guards.”

“Roffis?” She made it a question.

“He was killed.” No beating around the bush. I gave it to them cold. Everything except my talk with Ruth Moore and the cryptic Seven-for-a-secret business. “I’m working for the hotel. I have to clear Auguste. Miss Millett probably saw the killer; that would have been why she asked the guard to hurry into her bedroom, just before the murderer ran out of it and bumped into our room-service captain. You see why it’s important to find her. Fast.”

MacGregory muttered, “She’s probably out of the country by now.”

We walked up the slope to the chateau. She kept her hand on the producer’s shoulder.

“Don’t get mixed up in it, Jeff. You don’t have to. You run along.”

He said sharply, “How could I be more involved than I am! I’m not going to leave.”

“Jeff! Jeff, dear!” She shook him to get him to look at her. “I’d rather you did.”

“No.” He was stubborn. “I’m going to sit in on this hand. I’ve been dealt out too often.”

I was impatient to get the low-down on Lanerd, quickly. These two, batting it back and forth, didn’t seem very important. Hot-blooded youth making unsuccessful passes at neglected wife of gadabout boss. Kind of affair that goes on all the time. Not quite the way this one was going, though.

We crossed a flagged terrace, entered a long music room with a vaulted ceiling that went up two stories. The butler appeared; there was polite chitchat about drinks.

I asked for a rum sour, very sour. The producer ordered a Rob Roy and didn’t bother to explain how it was made; he’d been there quite a lot, evidently. When the butler left, Mrs. Lanerd went to the grand piano by the picture window looking out over the bay.

She played as she talked, softly. I don’t know what the music was; it would have sounded all right in our Gold Room at thé musicale. The drinks came in.

She wasn’t surprised there’d been trouble at the skater’s suite; Marge herself might have caused it. But probably Jeff had been right; Tildy Millett would be in Bermuda or on a plane to Europe by now. Dow would undoubtedly be with her. The piece she was playing was pretty doleful.

“That,” I said, “will make it look as if he killed Roffis.”

She admitted that to anyone who knew Dow it might look as if he was trying to help the girl get beyond the reach of the authorities. Not that her husband might not have gone abroad with Tildy even if there’d been no need for protecting her. They had planned a continental elopement — she played a little louder so I wouldn’t notice the tremors in her voice — Marge had known about it for some time. That was why she’d gone to the Plaza Royale that afternoon, to make one last attempt to scare the skater away from her husband.

There was another interlude on the high keys, clashing discords. I asked Mrs. Lanerd if she’d had any luck with Miss Millett.

She couldn’t say. Marge had been cold-blooded about it, had warned Tildy that plenty of girls had tried to break up Marge’s home and none had succeeded. Marge had been a show girl too long not to know how hard it was to hold a good man. Even when he wasn’t the good man she’d thought he was when she married him.

“You couldn’t get anywhere with your husband — no reconciliation?”

Reconciliation, of course. The usual scene, the same old promises. She knew better than to believe them. He was putty in the hands of the woman he happened to be with at the moment. So she said. She’d threatened to kill Tildy, indeed she had. At that point, Roffis — who hadn’t been at all sure he should have let her in the suite, anyway — put her out. Deep rumblings down at the left of the keyboard.

She’d been very upset, very excited, but she hadn’t said a single thing she didn’t mean from the bottom of her heart. Tildy had mentioned a possible divorce; Marge had scorned the idea. She knew all about her husband’s playing around; had long ago determined that she’d rather have a part of Dow Lanerd than all of any other man. And would go to absolutely any lengths to keep him. At least she’d accomplished one thing, she had thought. The guard hadn’t been aware of the elopement plans; as he pushed Marge out into the corridor he’d told her, sotto voce, not to worry; the District Attorney would see to it Tildy Millett didn’t get on any outward-bound plane.

Marge had counted on that slim consolation. But even then, as she left the hotel, it occurred to her perhaps Tildy also would fight for the man she wanted. If the person she had to battle had been Roffis — well — A crashing crescendo.

MacGregory supplied the crusher.

“I know Tildy killed him.”

How did he know?

“She was coming unstuck when she got to the studio tonight.” He tried to get Mrs. Lanerd away from the piano, but she kept right on pounding those tremendous chords. “I didn’t think she’d be able to do the show at all. She cried, stumbled over chairs as if she’d been in a car accident and was suffering from shock. I couldn’t catch all the things she was moaning while I was trying to calm her. But one thing I did hear, good and clear.”

Marge let her hands drop from the keys. The room still echoed from the thundering piano.

“She cried, ‘I had to do it! I had to do it, Jeff! I couldn’t give him up! I couldn’t!’”

Chapter seventeen:

Fiery femme

In my experience, nobody can dope out dames. But nobody.

Those mass-opinion pollsters who’d tied on the bib and tucker in our Crystal Room might come up with such pithy data as that on winter afternoons five out of seven femmes will prefer the north or sunny side of Thirty-Fourth Street, while in summer it’s the other way around. But they’d never be able to guarantee it in the case of any particular distaffer.

So I had no confidence in my ability to figure out what a girl like Tildy Millett might do under any given set of circumstances. Still it didn’t seem quite rational for her to knife a man guarding her from a killer, wait around for the dead man’s partner to escort her to a studio, rattle off We Won’t Go Home Until Morning — and then elope. Not unless she had Borgian blood in her.

There was nothing wrong with Marge Lanerd’s statement. Or MacGregory’s topper. No real flaw, except there’d been no explanation of Lanerd’s pose with the automatic, after Tildy’d left for the studio. No mention of the man in the cream-colored suit. No reference to the gay doings Lanerd had arranged with Edie Eberlein and her little et al’s. Only half a dozen other minor discrepancies left unaccounted for.

But I had to believe Marge Lanerd. It had been hard for her to strip her emotions like that. No easier because MacGregory had been there to hear just how she felt about her husband. He didn’t look as if he’d enjoyed the recital.

“If Mister Lanerd’s actually done a skip-out,” I said, “he’d probably get in touch with some member of his firm, let him know.”

MacGregory doubted it. “Kenson’s in London. Frank Fullbright’s on a cruise somewhere. He’d let his secretary know, I suppose.” He glanced moodily at Mrs. Lanerd.

I asked if I might use the phone. The butler brought it, on a forty-foot cord plugged in somewhere off in a corner. I got the hotel, asked for 21CC.

Ruth Moore answered tautly. “Yes?”

“Gil Vine, Miss Moore.”

“Haveyouheardanything?” She hurried the words together.

“I was just about to ask you that.”

“He hasn’t phoned.” Her voice quavered with strain. “But — she called in. About ten minutes ago.”

“Miss Millett?”

“Yes. She asked for — Dow. She was all on edge when I told her we hadn’t heard from him. Crying, carrying on—”

“Where was she?”

“I asked her, but all she’d say was, ‘Mister Lanerd’ll know where to find me. Ask him to call me the minute he comes in, please.’” The secretary was close to the crack-up point herself.

That was that. She hadn’t thought about stalling while she had the call traced. Hadn’t said anything about the murder, naturally. Hadn’t even told Hacklin & Co., about the call.

I suggested she do that, gave the usual fatuous advice about taking it easy, told her I’d let her know soon’s I learned anything. After hanging up I had a feeling there were times when the telephone could be an instrument of torture.

Waiting — everybody waiting to hear from Mr. Giveaway. Hacklin, Ruth Moore, Marge Lanerd, not to exclude G. Vine.

“Might relieve your mind to know Tildy Millett isn’t planing to points east, Mrs. Lanerd. She just talked to Miss Moore. It wasn’t long-distance or our operator would have mentioned that before completing the call.”

“She’s with him?” MacGregory asked.

“No. I suppose she has a lot of friends who might put her up.”

“Not many, here.” Marge Lanerd trilled the high keys plaintively. “She’s from Minnesota, originally, but she bought a big place down in the Kentucky Bluegrass, when she isn’t in a show or on the road she spends practically all her time there. Her agent, Mister Walch, might put her up at his place.”

The producer vetoed that. “First place, Keith lives at the Gotham Athletic, which isn’t coeducational. Second place, she wouldn’t go to him for help; they’re always squabbling about publicity or contracts. He stays away from the studio about half the time because that Syrian maid of hers squawks about his making her nervous before a performance.”

“The maid,” I said. “This Nikky what’s-her-name.”

“Narian,” MacGregory answered.

“Where’s she from?”

“New Orleans, I think.” He shrugged. “She’s Tabasco, with a touch of T.N.T. Battles with me because I don’t have a private dressing-room for ‘her baby’ — goes at the boss all fire and combustion because he let the D.A. bottle her up in that hotel suite—”

“You can include me in that list, dear.” Marge smiled unhappily. “Nikky was ready to claw my eyes out this afternoon. She’d have done it, if Tildy hadn’t scolded her in Syrian—”

“Arabic,” MacGregory said.

“Yair.” I gave the phone back to His Haughtiness. “Well. We know she’s still in town. So Mister Lanerd couldn’t have gone out of town with her. Expect you’ll be hearing from him any minute.” I was lying by the clock. But it didn’t seem right to inflict my suspicions on Mrs. Lanerd. She had enough of her own to contend with.

It was just eleven by the neon-circled clock on Dave’s Place when I crunched the gravel of the parking oval under my tires. Just three hours since Ada’d showed me a spot of oil on a pillow slip.

The last of the fight fans would be surging out of the Garden. The first of the theater crowd would be straggling into the Calypso Room. I was tired and puzzled and uneasy as a cat on a hot stove; Lanerd’s disappearance bothered me. Everything I knew about him indicated he’d be the sort to keep in touch at a time when the storm signals were flying.

The burgery wasn’t chock-full of chic; what it was full of was cabbage and beef-stew odors. But there were a couple of motorcycles out in the oval; they had state licenses. Those road cops seldom patronize places where the grub isn’t first chop.

“T-bone and French frys,” I told the shorty behind the counter.

“Smothered?”

“Uh, uh.” That’s a cross all hotel men have to bear. No onions. Ever.

I consoled myself with a jug of brew, took it into a phone booth that smelled like a smoking car on the Erie.

When I got through to Tim, I forgot about the smell. “That hophead,” he boomed excitedly. “That Al Gowriss and so forth!”

“Remember your blood pressure. What about him?”

“Maxie — on car four — he made this hophead right away, soon’s Morry showed him the flyer. Maxie was off duty, but Morry got hold of him, called him back to check.”

“Gowriss in the house?”

“He was. This aft. Around six. Max don’t recall which floor Gowriss got off at. But he thinks prob’ly it was twenty. An’ Gil!”

“You’re busting my eardrum.”

“Max never did take this gorilla down again. None of the other elevator operators seem to have, either. He must still be upstairs!”

Chapter eighteen:

Girl in hiding

I hoped it was true. If it was, Auguste was in the clear on the killing, and since presumably Hacklin had half a dozen of the DAides in the hotel by then, they ought to nab Gowriss. But there was a small doubt in my mind. Maxie.

Max liked to tell the tale, to make it dramatic. If he took a Distinguished Personage in his car late at night and the gentleman had perhaps imbibed one over the eight, as Mickey would say, by morning Maxie would be relating how the rubber-legged guest had fallen flat on his face as he stepped out of the elevator. A pretty who smiled casually at Max would, an hour later, have been inviting him up to help unhook her girdle.

So I warned Tim not to call in the Marines until Gowriss’s presence in the hotel had been verified by someone less inclined to Play It Up Big.

“Okay, okay.” He was hurt that I hadn’t slammed down the receiver and come a-running. “Only other thing, this Schneider says Auguste admits bein’ in hock to some loan shark for two hundred an’ fifty seeds. This Schneider seems t’think that was the motive for robb’ry an’ the murder was committed because th’ guard discovered Auguste makin’ the grab.”

“If they’re going to list everyone who owes dough as a suspect, they’ll have a nice, long job. Look in the personnel file there, Timothy. Find the phone number for that pastry chef we got out of trouble with the steward’s department, for stealing that hundred pounds of caraway seeds. Tadross, wasn’t it?”

“Wait a sec.” I could see him going through the file as if he had mittens on. “Yeah. Khalil Tadross — no phone listed.”

“What’s his address?”

“Sixteen ’n a half Washington Street. I don’ know where that is—”

“I do. Look, Tim. There’ll be a couple of pressers still down in the valet room. Ask ’em if they remember seeing a cream-colored jacket with chocolate checks, last couple of days, huh?”

“Sounds like something Milton Berle’d wear. Say, I checked on Auguste’s scrap with the roast chef. Chef weighs fifty pounds more’n Auguste but he got backed into a hot oven just the same. Auguste is nobody to pick a muss with. When’ll you be back?”

“Little while. See if you can get Max to give you more details on Al Gowriss; if he remembers too much you’ll know it’s the balonus.”

The hullabaloo on the juke was something about a wild goose. I needed no reminder I might be chasing something I couldn’t catch.

Gowriss might have had an accomplice check in the hotel. Later on he could have gone up to the accomplice’s room, from there sneaked up to 21MM. But then how had Tildy Millett escaped assassination? And how had he managed to get in the suite? Had he been in her bedroom all the time they’d been eating in the living-room? Or had he gotten in after dinner, while the skater and Nikky were in the bedroom? Only way to find out was from Tildy. Or the Syrian maid.

Our kitchen staff is a sort of miniature United Nations. French sauce chefs, Austrian bakers, Danish fish cooks, Italian vegetable chefs, Filipino silver boys. And one Syrian, a pastry chef. There weren’t so many Syrians in New York; probably they kept to themselves fairly closely. A Tadross might know where to find a Narian.

A mile or so beyond Dave’s I stopped churning all that around, began to wonder about the taxi in my rear-view.

I’d been driving at thirty; the cab didn’t try to pass me, though its top lights were on, which meant it had no fare. At night cab jockeys seldom drive so slow when they’re out on the Parkway where there’s not much chance of picking up a customer.

Cars passed him, passed me; he stayed about a hundred yards behind me. I speeded up to fifty, passing other cars; he hung right there on my tail.

I swung off a Parkway exit, switched off my lights. He slowed, came right up to the exit, stopped for a second, then rolled on toward the city. If there was anyone riding in the rear seat I couldn’t see him; it was too dark and too far away for me to tell if the flag was down.

Nerves, Gilbert, I chided myself. Be peeking under your bed before you turn in, next thing you know.

Nerves or not, two people had been bedded down in the morgue already. I kept an eye out for a trailing taxi all the way to the East River Drive, but how was I to tell one cab from another? All I’d seen of the hackie was a low-pulled cap and an undershot jaw.

I crossed to Fourth, went down Lafayette, over to Broadway, west a block on Rector. Washington Street looked like something out of a Currier & Ives print of pre-Civil War New York.

Next to an imposing marble bank, a row of narrow stores; windows full of brassware and rugs and jewelry; squiggly black Arabic signs; the only English lettering names such as those on upper windows along Fifth Avenue below Thirty-Fourth. Bardwil, Maluf, Lian.

A brightly lighted coffee shop. More curlicue signs. A row of brick houses with dark hallways and gloomy alleys leading on back to courtyards somewhere. Small, dark, bearded men wearing derby hats and pointed slippers. Thin-boned women with beautiful oval faces and enormous almond-shaped eyes, long hair down over their shoulders. And strange, pleasant, spicy smells.

Sixteen and a half was between a coffee shop and a window full of musical instruments that looked like mandolins and guitars with the mumps.

I had to go to Battery Park to find a place to park. I kept an eye out for taxis as I walked back. There weren’t any.

The first youngsters I asked to direct me to Mr. Tadross just stared out of big black eyes, backed away from me, and ran. Finally I found an old man with a sweet, sorrowful face like that of a saint in those old Italian paintings; he directed me down a moldering hall, up a flight of stairs to a sort of rickety balcony opening onto a tiny court full of washing on clotheslines, trash barrels, and baby carriages.

There weren’t any numbers on the doors. I called, “Tadross,” a couple of times; he came out of one of the doors. A fat man with eyes sunk deep in bulgy sacs, a bulbous chin, he was in his undershirt and a pair of those pointed, heelless slippers.

He was glad to see me, until I told him what I wanted.

“I don’t know any girl of that name, Mister Vine. Has she done something bad?” He gazed at me fearfully.

“Not as far as I know. She can help get one of our room-service captains out of a mess, Tadross. Auguste. You know Auguste.”

His face lighted up.

“Oh, yes. He’s in trouble?”

“They’ve arrested him for something he didn’t do. But this Narian girl may be able to fix it.”

“One moment.” He disappeared into his room, came out directly in an embroidered silk jacket. “We will see.”

We went along the balcony, down the stairs, back through the black tunnel of the hall. On the street he asked me to wait.

“I will inquire among friends,” he said in his liquid half-French accent. “I think they may talk more freely if I am alone.”

“Sure.”

“I can promise nothing. But you have been a good friend. I myself might have been in trouble, save that you have a large heart.”

“I know when a man is really honest, Tadross.”

“Yes. So I will do what I can.”

He went into the coffee shop next door. I smoked and inspected glass jars of strange vegetables in a store window — They looked like vegetables; they may have been cuttlefish for all I know.

After a minute, Tadross came out, sluff-sluffed up Washington Street in his slippers. I lost sight of him.

It was fifteen minutes before he came back. His face was solemn.

“I can tell you,” he said slowly, “though I have made a falsehood by saying I would not do this.”

“You have to do those things sometimes.”

“She is not from here. The name is common but she is from the state of Louisiana. But she is a cousin of Golub Narian. He lives in the Syrian colony on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. You know?”

“Sure.” I’d never known there was a Little Syria in Brooklyn.

He gave me the address. “My friends were much disturbed when I asked about her.” Tadross fingered his chubby chin. “She is hiding from someone. She does not wish people to know where she is. And—” he searched my eyes thoughtfully, “you are the second tonight who has tried to find her. But the other — he learned nothing.”

Chapter nineteen:

Explaining a murder

My knowledge of Syria was limited to recognition of the round orange luggage stickers from the Hotel Magnifique in Damascus. Plus the fact that “on my whiskers’ life” is violent cussing in Lebanese. According to Tadross.

Even if I’d been hep to those travelogue talkies, it wouldn’t have helped me to understand the Narians. The house to which I’d been directed, a block away from the Atlantic Avenue section of Little Syria, was an ordinary frame double-decker, outside. Inside — even the glimpse from the hall to which the solemneyed teen-ager in a loose, long-sleeved, ankle-length silk something admitted me — the place was right out of the Arabian Nights.

A sunset of tapestries on the walls. Oriental rugs in rich wine and amber on the floor. More rugs over low divans. Stray scarfs of luscious silk, scattered around. Brass-and-black-marble coffee table with a circle of thimble-size gilt cups. A great glass-and-porcelain contraption with long tubing and a curved ivory pipestem on a copper stand. There were none of the nondescript steel engravings or wishy-washy color paintings such as decorate our soigné hotel apartments. The Narians didn’t miss them; in their place hung rifles with curved stocks and long blue barrels and mother-of-pearl inlay on the locks, scimitars with silver hilts and beautifully engraved blades, daggers with jeweled handles. As the radio commercials say, Mmmmm!

Golub Narian fitted the picture perfectly. About forty. Sharp-featured, long-nosed, thick-lipped; a face hewn out of well-polished mahogany. White fez on top, brown beard at the bottom.

He received me in the long living-room, listened politely with his head tilted, birdlike, while I told him I wanted to get in touch with the Miss Narian who accompanied Miss Tildy Millett. It seemed crass to say “worked for” in that home of splendor.

He was extremely sorry; he didn’t know what I was talking about; perhaps his English was too poor to understand me correctly; how had I happened to visit his home?

I said I’d just come from Mister Lanerd’s.

He was courteous but unimpressed. Some badly informed person must have misdirected me.

I’d been using my eyes while he gave out with his Levantine version of the runaround; the only genuinely New Yorky thing in that gorgeous room was a pile of newspapers on a copper-and-tile table beside one of the divans. A couple were in that curlicue type, but the one on top of the pile was our most lurid tabloid. Dated Wednesday, the eleventh. With a full-page picture of Johnny the Grocer as he lay in a puddle of blood on the floor of a phone booth. Story on page three!

Either Nikky had been there recently, or the Narians had learned of their cousin’s interest in Johnny Scaluck and his killer. I picked up the paper.

“There’s likely to be more of this sort of thing, Mister Narian. I may be able to save your cousin and Miss Millett a great deal of trouble if I can talk to Miss Narian.”

He wouldn’t admit anything. He surveyed me with an impassivity that would have earned him many a pot at our Dealer’s Choice Association meetings. He apologized for leaving me while he consulted with others who were doubtless as ignorant as he was, about the matters of which I spoke.

He was gone so long Nikky would have had time to get halfway to the Canadian border. I’d practically given up when zip! Suddenly a girl was in the room. She’d slipped in behind me so silently she could have plunged one of those scimitar blades in my back, before I knew there was anyone around. She was an older edition of the slender child who’d let me in the house, and wore the same kind of floor-sweeping silk wrapper. Long silver earrings dangled on either side of her olive face.

But the younger one was merely attractive. This girl was voluptuous. Prominent breasts, wide hips, sultry mouth. Even her almond-shaped eyes could have been an invitation, except they were resentful and hostile.

“Hello. You’re Nikky?”

“Who are you?” She wouldn’t admit anything, either.

“Gilbert Vine. I work for the Plaza Royale.” I didn’t want to frighten her by saying “detective.”

“What you want?”

“To get a message to Miss Millett.”

“How do I know where she is?” Nikky shrugged.

“There’s been an arrest in connection with the murder in Miss Millett’s hotel suite.”

She didn’t bat an eye.

“Miss Millett might save an innocent man by telling what she knows about the killing.”

“I am sorry. I cannot—”

She swung around as someone moaned, “Ahhh!” from the doorway.

Tildy rushed into the room. No fake eye patch or Spanish combs. The black wig was gone; the familiar platinum Dutch bob was back. Crisp white shirtwaist, pale lemon skirt. She was the Queen of Skates as I remembered her. Strictly a knockout.

After rubbing elbows with celebrities for a few years, you get to have a certain contempt for most of them, simply because it’s difficult to understand how they happen to be famous. But there are always a few who command your respect if not admiration. Hard to put your finger on that quality. Whatever it was, she had a lot of it. She would always be the center of attention, no matter how many others were around. She seized my arm frantically.

“They’ve arrested Dow?”

Evidently she’d been where she heard all I said, assumed that I meant I’d been with Lanerd, instead of at his home.

“You realize,” I made it sound exasperated, “half the cops in New York are hunting for you?” It might have been true by that time, for all I knew. “How long’d you think you could get away with this hide-and-seek?”

Nikky glared ferociously; two little white spots showed at her nostrils; I remembered what Lanerd had said about her temperament.

Tildy gripped my arm more tightly. “I did not know about Dow.”

“You knew about the dead man in your closet!” I had to shock her to get her to do what I wanted, but I didn’t dare carry it too far. Nikky was getting madder by the minute. “You knew someone would be arrested for Roffis’s death. So what’d you do! You ran out, leaving someone else—”

“No, no, no!” Tildy shook me, to emphasize her denial. “I was afraid. I knew there was a fight. But I did not know Roffis had been killed. No.”

“You weren’t in any doubt about there having been a fight!” I had to concentrate on Tildy. But out of the corner of my eye I saw the elder Narian come back into the room. “That probably someone had been hurt! But you didn’t bother to look! You didn’t tell anyone about the man who came in your bedroom!”

“Yes,” she said tensely. “I did tell Dow!”

“Funny he didn’t give Hacklin any description of the man.” The only way to reach her emotions was through her feeling for Lanerd, that was plain as boiled potatoes.

She released my arm. “Perhaps I didn’t—” She pressed finger tips to her temples. “Maybe I was too vague — but, of course, then I didn’t know Roffis had actually been murdered, you see.”

I stared with what I hoped was utter disgust. “You’re content to let it go at that?”

“I don’t want an innocent man to suffer — for a horrible crime like that. But when this — this intruder came in my bedroom—”

“How’d he get in?”

“I don’t know,” she cried. “He must have had a duplicate key. He was in the bedroom when I returned to it, after dinner.”

“You scooted right back to the living-room, asked Roffis to put him out?”

Nikky said sharply, “No, she did not. The man said he was from headquarters. Claimed he’d come to take Miss Millett downtown. He did look like a detective, too.”

I asked what a detective looked like.

Tildy made expansive gestures. “Oh, tall. Big. Broad-shouldered. Heavy-set.”

“What was he wearing?”

They couldn’t remember. Something dark, Nikky thought. Gray, said Tildy.

“What made you decide he wasn’t from headquarters?”

“Mister Roffis and Mister Hacklin, both, had warned us,” Tildy answered, “to be on the lookout for anyone pretending to be a policeman. And of course I was suspicious right off because he’d sneaked in my bedroom that way, and hadn’t spoken to Roffis or anything.”

“Yair? So you called your bodyguard. And?”

“He ran into the bedroom. We heard an angry argument,” she glanced at Nikky for confirmation; Nikky nodded; “then the bedroom door was slammed, and we couldn’t hear anything else. But after a few minutes, I began to be frightened. I called through the closed door to Roffis, and there wasn’t any answer.”

Nikky said, “I opened the door, and there wasn’t anybody there.”

“At first,” Tildy went on, “we supposed Roffis had put the man out and was taking him to a police station or the District Attorney’s office.”

Nikky added, “But when Mister Roffis didn’t come back, we were both very scared. I begged Miss Millett to call up Mister Lanerd, across the hall.” She touched Tildy’s arm, but the skater kept watching me to see how much of it I believed.

It had more holes in it than a fish net, but I let them think I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. “If you’d only gone back to the hotel after the show and made that statement, you’d have saved a lot of headaches. You better come back and make it now, before things get balled up worse for Mister Lanerd.”

Nikky said, “No,” flatly.

Tildy held her right arm stiffly at her side, clenched her right fist, and pounded her thigh. “I can’t let Dow suffer any more. But—” She couldn’t decide.

“All right. If you want to let it go at that.” I started for the door.

“No, no.” She bit her upper lip. “Wait. Wait! I will come.”

Nikky cried, “I’m going with you.”

“Not in that.” The skater eyed the native costume. “Go up and change. Hurry.”

Nikky swirled out in a flurry of silk.

Tildy flew to Golub Narian, put her arms around him, touched her cheek to his. “You will understand, dear friend. It’s better I go by myself. I will be back for Nikky later. Tell her I will be all right.”

She turned to me. “Quickly, before she comes down.”

We went out hastily. I helped her into my car, kicked the starter.

There was a red at the Atlantic Avenue corner. I slowed to try and make it without stopping.

The taxi rolled up alongside with its bumper about at my front hub cap when the first shot shattered the windshield halfway between my head and Tildy’s.

Chapter twenty:

A spray of bullets

My reflexes made me bend over the wheel, jam the accelerator to the floor, swing the car to the left to bump him; it happened too fast for me to reason out the best thing to do.

The shots kept coming. Sparks reflected in the spiderweb of the shattered glass. Staccato explosions like backfiring. A pinggg as a slug ripped the door at my side. Tinkle of glass on the pavement. Tildy screaming. And the terrific crash as my fender collided with him.

I must have been getting up to forty when we hit. It didn’t slow me, but it jounced the wheel so I had to wrench hard to keep from climbing the opposite curb. Tires screeched. The taxi’s headlights swerved left. The cab socked a hydrant with a smash like an ash can full of bottles being dropped from the second story.

I managed to straighten out, zoom around the Atlantic Avenue corner without slowing. There was a subway kiosk at the next corner but I kept revving it up until we’d covered nine more blocks to the next station.

It wasn’t safe to drive any more than I had to. The windshield couldn’t have had more cracks in it if a sledge hammer had worked on it. I couldn’t tell whether intentionally or otherwise the guy with the gun had drilled a tire or my gas tank. Besides, the three bullet holes in my windshield couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else by a traffic cop; we couldn’t have driven much farther without meeting one. I was allergic to blue broadcloth right then.

I braked, slewed in behind a parked florist’s truck. The streets were swarming, shirt-sleeved men standing around open-front candy stores, old women sitting in darkened doorways, couples jitterbugging on the sidewalk to music from an orchestra in a second-floor dance hall.

Tildy was still crouched, low on the seat, twisted around so she could look out through the jagged glass of the rear window. There weren’t any taxis coming up the avenue behind us; from the sound of that smashup I thought that particular cab wouldn’t be in shape to drive for a while.

She didn’t seem as much frightened as stunned when I helped her out, made some banal crack about “the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be” for the benefit of bystanders who were showing curiosity about our windshield. The only thing she said, as I led her down the subway steps, was, “He was trying to kill me.” I couldn’t deny that!

Psychology sharps use a trick to impress their pupils with the difficulty of observing and remembering an unexpected incident of violence. In the middle of a lecture two students will suddenly stand up, engage in a fierce fisticuff. A third stooge attempts to interfere, gets knocked down for his pains. A girl finally separates the contestants. The prof then asks one and all to put down on paper their recollection of what went on. He usually gets as many variations of the facts as there are students in the class. So I didn’t expect to get much help from Tildy’s description of what had happened. I was in error.

“When that guy in the cab started blasting, I was so busy handling the car I didn’t get a look in my rearview,” I told her while we walked up to the end of the platform to avoid the crowd. “You see him?”

“It was the same man.” A tiny sliver of glass had stuck to her cheek; she removed it, held it on her finder tip in fascination. “The one who came to the hotel.”

“Not the guy who shot Johnny the Grocer?”

“No, no. The one who — who must have killed Herb Roffis.”

I was fed up with all that hodelyo; probably a delayed take from those near misses and the damage to a good Buick. “Godsake, give me something to go on,” I said crossly. “Mustache? Beard? Fan ears? Pug nose? Was he dark? Or light?”

She leaned close; the Manhattan-bound train thundered in; it was hard to hear anything. “Florid, I should call him. Yes. A red face. No mustache.”

We slid into the first car, sat up close to the motorman’s compartment. There were only four other people in the car; the only one who paid any particular attention to us was a skinny girl with mean, narrow-set eyes. She nudged the older woman at her side; they whispered with much animation, craning their necks to get a better view of Tildy.

“How old would you say this bird was?” I kept after her. “Twenty? Forty?”

“In between. Say, thirty-four or five.” Tildy looked as if she might be sick to her stomach.

It took until we got to the Manhattan side to get the description. What it summed up to — the man she described could easy be arrested if the cops were looking for Roy Yaker. Or vice versa.

That gave me pause.

When Tildy asked if we were going straight to the hotel, I said, “We were. But I don’t believe that’s very smart, now. This boy with the lethal notions will expect us to do that. He may be there before we are.”

“I am so horribly afraid.” She showed it plainly. “For myself — for Dow. And — for you.”

“Fellow wasn’t after me.” I wasn’t as confident about that as I may have sounded; she hadn’t been in the car with me on the way in from Dave’s Place, but I’d been trailed just the same.

The skinny girl swayed up the aisle, bent over, eyes fixed on Tildy. “Pardon me, but aren’t you Tildy Millett?”

There were half a dozen others in the car by then; every head was turned our way.

Tildy smiled, shook her head in mock amusement. “I suppose you’re the thousandth person to ask me that.” She leaned close to me, smiled at me. “I guess she doesn’t ride in subways much, does she?”

The girl fumbled with “excuse me’s” and “the resemblance is astonishing,” went back to her companion.

I got Tildy off at the next stop, Thirty-Fourth Street. There was a drugstore on the corner. I shooed her in, went to a phone booth, called the hotel.

Mona answered, “Law, Mister V. How long can you be paged! Tim is going out of his mind—”

“A short trip and a merry one. Let me talk to him.”

“Holy Mother, Mister Vine!” When Tim “Misters” me, there is something very nokay and usually someone else in the office with him. “How quick can you get over here?”

“Whatsit, Timothy?”

“We — uh — got another one of those things upstairs.”

“Another what? A killing?”

“Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to say too much, Mister Vine, because I think prob’ly our beer is bein’ tapped, but it’s Mister L.”

Chapter twenty-one:

Flight from danger

That was a bad few minutes, in that booth.

Even at one-thirty ayem, a flock of nighthawks were flitting in and out of the drugstore, looking for pickups — or pick-me-ups.

I realized how helpless a guy in a phone booth could be if a killer cornered him there. There’d be nothing to do but take it, even if a man had a gun. No room to aim. No shelter to dive beneath. I kept my eyes peeled for cream-colored suits, for weasel-faces like the one on that police flyer, for ruddy-cheeked individuals — while I extracted what I could from Tim.

Dow Lanerd was dead. Bullet in his brain. Found in the bathroom of his suite about an hour before by special Prosecutor’s assistants seeking to get Lanerd’s fingerprints for comparison with the bloody marks on Tildy’s bedroom door. Tim couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say whether they’d chalked it for murder or suicide. He confined his replies to “Yuh” and “Uh, uh.” Clearly a plain-clothes man was in my office, listening to what Tim said. That’s what he’d meant to warn me about when he’d suggested my phone line was tapped.

I cut it short, told him I’d be in soon’s possible, said nothing about Tildy. It didn’t seem as if she could have had anything to do with Lanerd’s death. Ha!

I didn’t know what to do with her. Hacklin wouldn’t have let her stay in 21MM. Anywhere around the Plaza Royale she’d be taking a big risk. After this third death in the case, not to mention the thin margin by which those slugs had missed us on Atlantic Avenue, I needed no more convincing that she was in extreme danger. Even hanging around in that drugstore was plenty perilous.

I made a quick purchase, whisked Tildy out to the taxi rank on the opposite corner. The driver was half asleep, cap over eyes; he didn’t have an undershot jaw or look as if he’d mashed his nose against the steering wheel in a collision with a hydrant.

It seemed brutal to break it to her cold. I tried to work up to it, step by step. “Remember Auguste, your room-service captain? They arrested him for Roffis’s murder.”

It took her mind off her own troubles for a minute. “That’s ridiculous! Why would they? He’s so gracious!”

“Idea seemed to be he’d stolen a diamond-crusted compact from you, Roffis caught him with the goods.”

“But I gave it to Auguste. It was a present.”

“That’s what he said. They didn’t believe him. It’s quite a bauble to get for pourboire.”

“Yes, it’s valuable. I hope he can sell it for something. I told him so. Once,” she gazed sadly out at the Times Square turmoil, “it had also a sentimental value for me. But no more — no more.” She sighed. “Since I did not wish to use it, I couldn’t bear to see it around. I gave it to Auguste gladly.”

“Fixes Auguste on that score. They’ll still hold him for murder.”

“They mustn’t, they mustn’t. I’m positive he didn’t do it, absolutely positive.” She accepted the peasant kerchief I’d bought at the drugstore counter, began to fold it to arrange over her head. It wouldn’t be as effective a disguise as that theatrical wig, but it made her less conspicuous.

“Being positive doesn’t salt any celery. Mrs. Lanerd was positive you stabbed Roffis.”

“She would be. She hates me for taking Dow away from her.” Tildy held her head very high; I think she was crying but she wasn’t noisy about it. “She doesn’t need to worry. All that is — over.”

“Jeff MacGregory was reasonably positive, too, about your having killed your bodyguard. Because of something you said at the studio tonight, to the effect you had to do it, you couldn’t give him up. He thought you were referring to Roffis.”

“Oh! No!” She clasped her hands pathetically. “I did not. I never did.”

“You meant Lanerd?”

She made a little strangling noise in her throat; her shoulders shook.

“If that’s what was in your mind, you’ll have some explaining to do, now Lanerd’s dead.”

For the time it took our cab to go half a block I thought she hadn’t heard me.

Then she whispered, “Dow? Not Dow!”

I nodded.

Barely audible: “I don’t believe it.”

“He’s at the hotel. I suppose they’ll let you see him.” I tried to make it matter-of-fact.

She whimpered as if I’d struck her. “You’re being cruel. To frighten me.”

“Frighten you? After what happened on Atlantic Avenue?”

“It is true then? Honestly?” For a bit she couldn’t seem to understand. When she spoke again her tongue was blurred as if she was tight. “Do they know — have they any idea — who did it?”

“Not yet. Might have been suicide.”

“You couldn’t say that if you’d known him. No one ever was fonder of life than Dow.” If I hadn’t been watching her, I’d have thought she’d taken a long pull from a secret flask; she began to weave back and forth on the seat, drunkenly. “Was that — that same — horrible person.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “Get hold of yourself; we’ll be at the hotel in a few minutes.”

“Driver,” she slurred it so it sounded like “Drier.”

“Stop this cab! At once! Let me out!”

The driver slowed, looked over his shoulder, scowled at me, pulled in toward the curb.

“Go on,” I said quietly. “The lady’s a little upset. She’ll be all right, soon’s—”

She flung the door open. The cab was still moving. She stumbled out, collapsed on the curb.

The driver braked the car with a jerk, swearing under his breath. “Want I should call a cop to handle this, miss?”

“Shut up.” I poked a bill over the window ledge at him. “She’s all right.”

Tildy lurched to her feet, started down the street, half running, head down, bumping blindly into passers-by.

As I went after her the driver’s scorn followed me. “... ashamed yaself, gettin’ a nice goil like that plastered...”

“Tildy!” I caught her, held her. “Snap out of it.”

“My fault,” she whimpered. “All on — ’count of me.” She leaned weakly against a store window. “He’d be alive this minute if I hadn’t been a rotten coward.”

“Don’t you start blaming yourself. There’ll be plenty of others doing that. Let’s get off the street, back to the hotel, huh?”

“I’d rather die.” She drew a long, shuddering breath, opened her eyes. “If you take me back, I’ll kill myself first chance I get.”

“Now, now—” Couples began to slow their strides to observe us. I couldn’t watch her and keep an eye out for a man who looked like Roy Yaker at the same time. “No need to talk wild.”

“Mean every word of it. I’ll jump out the window — anything—”

“Okay. All right. Tone it down.”

Someone in the clustering crowd inquired loudly, “Hey, isn’t she Tildy Millett?” I wanted to get away from there, on the double.

“I couldn’t bear to see Dow — like that.” She let me lead her along the sidewalk, away from the onlookers. “I want to remember him as he was.” Her teeth chattered as if it were eight below instead of eighty above. “I’m not going, that’s all.”

“Well, hell. I can’t let you go back to Brooklyn.” I quickened our pace. “That sharpshooter may still be hanging around the Narians’. He might not miss next time. I can’t leave you here on the street—”

“No!” She moaned in terror. “Don’t leave me — please don’t leave me. I couldn’t stand being alone.” Half a block away, a marquee necklaced with yellow bulbs shone dimly over the entrance to the Hotel Brulard. I hurried her toward it before any more pedestrians collected around us.

She glanced dully up at the marquee. “What’s this?”

“Hotel. You have to spend the night somewhere.”

She hung back. “I won’t go ’less you promise not to leave me.” Hers was a loud plaintive voice for that street, that late!

If the back of my neck wasn’t red at some of the comments made by busybodies within earshot, it’s only because I long ago forgot how to blush.

But I said, “Kayo. Okay. I promise. Let’s go.”

We went in.

Chapter twenty-two:

The third corpse

The only known species of plain-clothes operative which doesn’t try to conceal the fact it is engaged in detective work is the sort of security men employed by hotels like the Brulard. Instead of mingling with the guests, these house officers advertise their calling in an attempt to intimidate the evildoer, warn him off the premises, show him he’s under surveillance. Pat Ashmore, at the Brulard, would stand in the lobby, feet planted wide, arms folded on chest, cigar between teeth, glaring at some citizen trying to make an impression on a strange pair of nylons. That’s the way Pat worked. Only way he knew how to.

Pat was by the newsstand when we went in. He spotted us right away, but didn’t recognize me until we’d crossed almost to the registration desk. Then he laid the cigar on the edge of the closed magazine counter, sauntered over, about as subtly as if he’d been blowing a whistle.

Pat knew me from our Protective Men’s Association; was a time when they risked solvency by making me treasurer. But of course he couldn’t understand what I was doing in the Brulard. Especially with a girl!

I parked Tildy in a big chair with her back to the main desk, went over to Pat.

“Hi, Junior.” He weighed two-thirty without his mustache.

“H’are ya, y’old yentzer.” He shook hands. “What is that you got there, th’ most beautiful floatin’ rib in captivity, huh?” He admired Tildy’s legs discreetly.

“We want a big double or a suite if you have any.”

“Ah, now, Gilbert — not in the Brulard.” He pursed his lips in disappointment.

“No time to go into details,” I said, “but nothing lecherous, ’pon honor.”

“Honest, Gil, if it was the Ma-ha-ra-ja of Kablootz, I couldn’t.”

“You can. You will. Not for me. For the girl. She’s in a bad jam. Matter of life and death. No kidding at all. She has a suite with us. But it’s not safe there for her.”

His eyes grew round. “But you said — ‘We.’”

“’Sright. You feex. But quick. I’ll put cards on the table with you tomorrow. This is serious, Pat.”

“I dunno — no luggage.” He pondered. “You want to register?”

“Sure. But you get the key and the card. Take us up. I’ll sign there.”

He did it. In three minutes we went through the “ill-fitting door to the empty room that smells like a fairly empty tomb” as Ogden Nash once described it. Musty brocade by the windows, musty plush on the overstuffed chairs. Standing lamp that had seen better days and a lot of ’em. A vintage bed. A bathroom that made me look to see if they’d taken out the gaslight fixtures.

After the broken-down old bellman departed with the registration card, Tildy slumped forlornly in one of the upholstered monstrosities. “You must think I’m a worthless little slut.”

“No. I think you’re too scared to know what you’re doing.”

She examined me searchingly then for the first time. “Yes, I am, that’s true. I shouldn’t have expected you to come up here with me. I have no justification for dragging you into this hideous business.”

“You didn’t drag me up here. I came willingly.” I wasn’t surprised to find the telephone one of the old-fashioned sort with the receiver hanging on a hook. I picked it up, waited for the operator.

“They must have thought it queer, downstairs. How did you register? John J. Jones and wife?” She made an attempt at a smile.

“Maybe I should just have written Mister and Missus Lx.” I jiggled the hook.

She stood in front of the gay-nineties bureau, taking off the kerchief; she froze with both hands up to her head.

“Lx. What do you mean?”

I took the note out of my pocket. “This was stuck in your mail pigeonhole after you left the suite tonight.”

She came, reached for it as if it were a scorpion. Her expression was wooden; she didn’t seem puzzled at all.

The operator came on. I gave the P-R number. Asked for Fran Lane.

“Fran? Mister V.”

“Yes, sir. We weaned that playboy away from his fair charmers. They’re out.”

“Swell.” I appreciated her choice of words. “That’s not what I’m calling about. I’m at the Brulard. Know it?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Hike over. Room four-one-six. Bring a nightgown or pajamas or whatever you wear.”

“Sir?” She must have thought I was completely off my rocker.

“This is not Lothario Vine speaking.”

“Oh?”

“And, Fran. Do you happen to have any Rip Van Winkles?”

“I can get some.”

“Do so. Make it quick-like. And if anyone wants to know where I am, I’m at the automat trying to find the place to put my nickels for crepes suzette.”

Tildy came right up close to me, lifted her face to mine. “You’re getting your girl friend to come over here, to stay with me.”

“My assistant. She doesn’t know you’re here. She mistrusts my intentions, I fear.”

“I could have called Nikky.”

“So the gent with the boom-boom could trail her right over here? No, thanks. Fran’s dependable. If there’s anything else you want, she can get it for you.”

“You’re just real nice, Mister Vine.”

“Awarding of prizes later. What’s with the note?”

“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Dow—” She stopped. “What are you waiting for? Another victim?”

I never thought the time would come when I’d be alone in a bedroom with a girl as pretty as that, and have my only emotional reaction anger. That’s the way I felt. I was beginning to be leery of her. “Roffis dead. Lanerd dead. Few minutes ago you said you’re to blame. Why are you?”

“Because if I’d kept my mouth shut right at the beginning, down in that wretched café, none of it would have happened.”

“Don’t give me that. You said it was because you were a coward. That wasn’t cowardly, identifying Gowriss.”

“Oh — by being a coward—” she was flustered, “I only meant I’d been afraid somebody’d be killed trying to protect me; if I’d just run away from the hotel before — and let Gowriss or his gang shoot me — the others would have lived.”

It was thin as wet tissue, but I couldn’t bully her around to get the truth out of her. If Lanerd’s death wouldn’t make her talk, I didn’t know what would.

“What about that ‘had to do it’ business MacGregory mentioned?”

She’d had time to think up an answer. “I meant that if eloping with him was the only way for me to be with Dow, I had to do it; I couldn’t give him up.”

It clicked into place all right, but I couldn’t tell when to believe her any more. “You know Edie Eberlein?”

“I used to. Years ago. On the Coast.” She didn’t ask why I wanted to know.

“Seen her lately? Give her the key to your Plaza Royale suite?”

“No — to both.”

Right then Fran knocked; I let her in.

She had a bag with her, a train box I believe they call those things that are too small for a suitcase and too big for a handbag. She and Tildy liked each other; Fran didn’t seem to mind when I told her she was in for the night.

“Bring those sleeping-pills?”

“Phenobarbs. Yessir.”

“Take a couple, Tildy,” I told her. “Whether you want to or not. Understand?”

“Where you going?”

“Plaza Royale. See you at breakfast.”

She threw her arms around me and kissed me; none of that cheek-against-cheek routine, either. Fran made big eyes and a round mouth at me, behind Tildy’s back. I went away.

Zingy saw me the second I came through the Fifth Avenue door. He touched his index finger to his forehead. The head man, that meant. “They’re all up on the twenty-first, Mister V. Want you right up there.” They were in the 21CC living-room. Tim, Reidy, Hacklin, Schneider, another eager beaver from the Prosecutor’s homicide detail. They were all solemn and brooding; Tim and Reidy because Lanerd’s death meant the worst possible break for the house, the others because an important witness in the Roffis matter had been demised right under their noses. Hacklin, especially, was a very subdued man.

Tim took me in to see the body. It was in the bathroom opening off the room with the ticket-littered twin beds.

Lanerd lay on his side beside the bathtub, as if he’d been sitting on the edge of it when the bullet went into his right temple. There was very little blood. The gun wasn’t there. His face was gray and drawn beneath the once-radiant tan; the carved-marble hair looked like wet ashes in the snow. The fingers of his right hand made a claw. He didn’t have that Man of Distinction look, there with his head beneath the wash basin. The resemblance to the Mr. Giveaway on the cover of the magazine was still there, but the contrast with the flood of cars and washing machines and money was pretty pitiful.

What a stir this man’s death was going to cause! What a stink, to the security office!

“They’re waitin’ for the camera crew,” Tim said. “They had another job up in Harlem. Be here any minute. The gun went down to the lab.”

“His own gun?”

“Yeah. My personal judgment, it was a self-exit, Gil.”

“That what the others think?”

“What else can they believe after readin’ th’ note?”

“He left a suicide note?”

“No. A farewell note from her. Tildy Millett. It’s out on the table.”

It was on that same Plaza Royale stationery.

Dow Beloved— I’ve changed my mind. I can’t do it, darling. I simply can’t — the way things stand. I’m dreadfully broken up about it. I never will get over it. Or ever be anything except your own T.

Chapter twenty-three:

Bait for a slugging

If I’d been one of those fictional dicks who deduce a criminal’s entire life history from the manner in which he drops his cigar ashes, it would all have been simple then, I suppose. All I’d have had to do would have been to crawl around with a magnifying glass, retire to my dressing-gown, give myself a shot in the arm, play a solo on my battered fiddle, and zango! Everything clear as a slug of straight gin. Whereas nothing was clear to me except that the prominent corpse in the bathroom wasn’t the doing of one Al Gowriss.

Reidy informed me, “We compared the note with Miss Marino’s registration card. Same writing, Gil.” I asked if the gun was in Lanerd’s fist or on the floor when they found him.

“He had it gripped tight,” Hacklin grumbled. “So don’t strain your brain givin’ us suggestions. We had all the amateur advice we want.”

“From Lanerd’s secretary?” I inquired.

“No, not from Lanerd’s secretary.” He mocked me, annoyed. “We didn’t get anything from her, thanks to you lettin’ her out of the suite before I had a chance to question her. She skipped — an’ that’s only one of the stumblin’ blocks you’ll have to account for when we haul you over the barrel.”

“We got a man after her, to bring her in,” Schneider said. “She must’a known about the suicide, an’ concealment of a crime is just as much a felony as helpin’ a suspect escape. Maybe the body was there when you were here in his suite with her?”

I said if it had been, I hadn’t known it. Any notion of telling them about Tildy or the events over on Atlantic Avenue went out of my head. If they meant to pass the buck to me for the bungling that’d gone on, I might need an ace up my sleeve.

Schneider waved at a couple of accordion-folded tickets caterpillaring along the top of a fingerprint-equipment case. “This is a wrap-up. Lanerd was nuts about the skater. He planned to go away with her. He had those plane tickets to Rio in his pocket along with her note. We know it wasn’t his wife he planned to take along; we phoned her; she didn’t even know he intended to go to Rio.”

Reidy said, “Mrs. Lanerd’s on her way here.”

“Grrr!” I didn’t want to be present at that farewell party. “Better get a nurse from the hospital suite, just in case.”

Reidy hadn’t thought of that, went to take care of it.

Hacklin took up where Schneider’d left off.

“Roffis must have tried to veto this buzzaway to Miami and Rio, and Lanerd fixed him. That’s why Herb hadn’t unholstered his gun; he knew Lanerd and naturally figured he didn’t have anything to fear from the big shot.”

I said, “Then Lanerd hung around after the killing? Waiting for a streetcar, maybe?”

“We figure that after the murder, Miss Millett got cold feet, turned Lanerd down, wrote him that note, and decided to beat it all by herself. I know there was some trouble between ’em, because when I got to the suite, she’d been bawling.”

“Why didn’t Lanerd leave the suite when you did?” I asked.

“I asked him to stay,” Hacklin answered. “He wanted to come to the studio with us, but I wanted someone there to tell Herb what had happened, if he came back while I was away.”

Schneider stuck a palm out toward me inquiringly. “What else would a prominent party like him do, faced with ruin an’ exposure? Nothing but put a period to himself.”

I knew they must have something else; it was too pat.

“I didn’t know him. But he seems to have enjoyed what the psyko sharps would call a very satisfactory sex life. Two or three of ’em, probably. I never heard of a man who was enjoying life that way committing suicide. Look at it another way, a lad who hunted grizzlies and liked to fight swordfish doesn’t seem like the fella to dig a blade in another man’s back.”

“The knife.” Tim looked distressed. “The steak knife, Gil. I didn’ want to mention it on the phone—”

“You found it?”

Hacklin nodded ponderously. “Wrapped in a bath towel. In the bottom of the towel hamper in his bathroom. Coupla feet from the body.”

I attempted irony. “Ties the ball of wax up nice and neat. No need to hold Auguste, hah?”

Schneider came toward me with that same slow, surly approach Hacklin had tried on me earlier. “We figure the murder took place right after dinner. While Auguste was in the next room. Until somebody proves different, we’ll put it down Auguste was paid to keep his mouth shut. Paid with that compact. What you got to say about that, Smart Stuff?”

“Pick a four-letter word,” I answered. “I could use any of ’em. I don’t believe Dow Lanerd committed suicide.”

“The gun, Gil.” Tim was really suffering, trying to get me to understand how thoroughly they had the case corked up. “They sent the gun down to the lab with the knife. They can compare the bullet an’ give the right mitt of the body a paraffin test; that’ll cinch it.”

Paraffin! The word socked me straight in the teeth! That might be the answer, or part of it. Wax. Sure.

“Yair.” I nodded as if he’d finally convinced me. “I guess it would, Tim. Unless you verified that report about Al Gowriss’s being in the house.”

Schneider laughed scornfully. “They had a teletype, downtown. From Trenton, New Jersey. Gowriss was identified as one of three men who stuck up a filling-station an’ filled the attendant with lead. About six o’clock tonight, the holdup was.”

Tim added, “In my opinion, Maxie didn’t see this hophead at all. He give me so many details he began contradictin’ himself. I think he just wanted t’ feel important.”

“Common failing.” I heard loud talk in the corridor. When the door opened to let in half a dozen more of the special assistants, I went into the other bedroom. No one followed me or heard me when I opened the door, stepped out into the corridor.

Technically I wasn’t under arrest. But they could have held me for balking them on Auguste, on Ruth. Hacklin wouldn’t let me get away without a stance down at Criminal Courts. I had other fish to fry.

It was long after Mrs. Munster’s quitting-time; the only employee in the housekeeper’s office was Martha Canaday, a spinsterish gal of sixty with thick-lensed eyeglasses.

“This afternoon one of the maids turned in a soiled bedspread that had spots of wax on it, Martha. I want to know what room it came from.”

“But Mister Vine,” she complained, “I couldn’t possibly find out until the girls come in tomorrow — I mean this afternoon — it’s Sunday already.”

“That’s right. Leave word with Ada, she’s to ask each maid before the girls go on the floors. Don’t forget it. It’s important.” I wasn’t sure it was, but if the wax had gotten on the spread the way I thought it might have, it would be practically decisive. “Maybe the girl remembers whether there was any wax on the glass top of the bed table, too.”

Down in the PBX room, Mona was still on the 21MM section of the board. I told her what I wanted.

She put her tongue in her cheek. “We strive to please. The voice with the smile is the voice worth while. And so forth. But that’s a toughie. You know we don’t keep any record of locals, Mister V.”

“The operators mark ’em down as they come through, don’t they?”

“Yes. But they scrap the Numbers Wanted sheet as fast as they’re checked off, completed.”

“See ’f you can find any old ones that cover charges for 21CC. Lanerd may have called a certain babe whose name isn’t in the phone book. He might have called an unlisted number.”

Mona rolled her eyes, caught her underlip between her teeth.

“Plenty of numbers call him, from what I hear. Quite a Casanova, isn’t he?”

“You get a lot of attention from the tender sex when your income is in six figures.”

“How trite but true.” She departed. “See what I can do.”

What she did was to come up with a crumpled slip; on it a number which Lanerd had called twice within an hour Saturday morning. It was in the Trafalgar exchange.

“Now you want me to find out who the subscriber is?”

Mona was a step ahead of me most of the time.

“If it’s a Miss Ruth Moore, I want the address, too.” It was.

Moore, Ruth, residence, four twenty-nine West Seventy-Fifth,” Mona reported, after a chat with some chum in the traffic supervisor’s office. “By the by, somebody in 21CC wants me to locate you, Mister V.”

“You tried. You failed. You’re sorry. Thanks. Go home now, or wherever it is you go Saturday nights.”

“Puh-leeze, Mist -er Vine.”

I cabbed up to Seventy-Fifth, phoned from a basement beer and grill just off Broadway, had no answer for my nickel.

Four twenty-nine was a four-story brownstone, sedate and dignified. Four mailboxes, buttons to press under each one. Name cards above the buttons. R. Moore, engraved, was Apt. 2.

I pushed the button. Waited.

The street door, which ought to have been latched at that time of night, was hooked back because of the heat. I climbed stairs smelling of soap powder and furniture oil. The door to the second-floor apartment was open a crack. Warm light spilled out into the dark hall; a radio or a phonograph was playing Nobody’s Sweetheart Now.

I thumbed the buzzer. It was out of order or else it didn’t make enough noise for me to hear out in the hall.

I pushed the door open farther, called, “Miss Moore?”

On the floor, about a yard inside the door, was a square envelope. Face down. With the Plaza Royale crest on the back.

I had my fingers on it when the roof fell in.

Chapter twenty-four:

Blackjack deluxe

The buzzing began before I hit the floor; I remember thinking someone must be punching that button downstairs.

I’d have gotten up right away except someone was holding my wrists. The buzzing kept right on. I tried to get a little leverage into my twisting, to break the guy’s grip, but he held me easily. The light became brighter; it hurt my eyes to focus on the face above me. A dark face, black eyes behind pince-nez, a spiky black beard. And a soft, soothing voice. Like Peter Lorre. “Don’t try to get up, just keep quiet.”

Furniture in the room began to lose its blurred shape, and I closed my eyes to steady myself. I knew I hadn’t been unconscious even for half a second, but the room I was in wasn’t the foyer of the Moore girl’s apartment. This was blue or blue-gray, with dozens of lights.

I opened my eyes just a slit to see if I could catch Pointed Beard relaxing his grip. A second face bent over me, Ruth Moore.

“Don’t try to move.” She put a hand on my chest. The lights became only two, one on a table beside the bed I lay on, one in the ceiling. The rest were reflections from mirrors in the modern bureau, and an ash-blond vanity against the blue-gray wallpaper. On the table beside the lamp was a black bag.

“That’s better.” The Peter Lorre voice sounded relieved. White teeth smiled above the Van Dyke. “You’ll be all right. But you must be still.”

The secretary patted my shoulder. “You had a concussion. Doctor Elm thought we’d have to take you to the hospital.”

I said, “Sure,” but it sounded like “Sewer” because I didn’t seem to have much co-ordination. Beside a huge cabinet photograph of Dow Lanerd wearing an open-necked wool shirt, a tiny gilt clock ticked away beneath the buzzing; its hands pointed to quarter to five. I compared it with my wrist watch. The clock was two minutes slow. I’d been out more’n an hour!

The doctor stirred stuff in a glass. “This’ll take some of that fuzziness off your tongue.”

I drank it. Poor substitute for lager.

“What was it?” I put my hand up to my head, found it turbaned with a rubber bandage. The back of my neck was cool and damp where the compress had leaked down.

Ruth held up a beautifully grained piece of wood about eighteen inches tall, a carved statue, all sinuous thighs and pointed breasts, tapering down to a sort of fishtail base. Kind of thing you see in a jeweler’s window on a black velvet background. Very arty. “This was on the floor beside you, Mister Vine, when I came back from the delicatessen.”

The doctor replaced paraphernalia in his bag. “Your Panama saved you. The statuette apparently hit you squarely in the back of the head, where the sweatband cushioned the blow sufficiently to prevent a skull fracture.”

I told him the hat had been repaying a just debt; I’d ransomed it often enough at checkrooms. I began to feel halfway human. The buzzing died away some. “Who crowned me?”

Ruth exclaimed, “We were waiting for you to tell us!”

“Never saw him. Was stooping over. He was behind the door.”

“I don’t know, either!” She hunched her shoulders up, made an O of her mouth. “Maybe he was still here in the apartment when I came back and found you. Maybe—” she glanced fearfully at the closet.

The doctor opened the closet door. A light came on inside, automatically. There were a half-dozen neckties on a rack on the inside of the door, but no intruder. “As I suggested before, my dear young lady, it would be wiser if you called the police. I will be required to report the assault, in any event.”

Ruth said in a very small voice, “I’d rather not. Not right now. Mister Vine?”

“I’ll take care of it.” I sat up. “How much I owe you, Doc?”

They both rushed at me, pushed me back on the bed.

“You must not try to get up,” she scolded.

The doctor nodded vigorously. “She’s right. You have a good nurse. Mind her. I’ll be back later to—”

“Hey! Wait!” He’d turned, headed for the door. “I’ve got too many things to do—”

“You’ll sleep,” he said. “Nothing else is as important to you as sleep. Good morning, Miss Moore.”

I got one foot off the bed. “Sleep, hell.” My head was clear as a bell. No girl was going to keep me in bed. But I’d better take it easy at first. Rest a bit. Yair. Just half a minute.

When I woke, hot sunlight latticed through the Venetians. My wrist watch said 12:45. There was singing out in another room; it wasn’t good enough to be the radio. She was singing O Sole Mio. New style.

I got out of bed. My mouth tasted like burned insulation smells. But my eyes were all right. My legs weren’t shaky. And my voice sounded normal when I said, “Good morning.”

She was determined I should pile right back in bed. She wanted to call the doctor immediately. It wasn’t safe. I might collapse any minute.

I told her very likely I would unless I got something to eat. Did she have any suggestions?

When she saw I wasn’t going to nose-dive on the kitchenette linoleum, she thought she could make me a bacon omelette with broiled mushrooms and hot biscuits. Did I prefer tomato juice or orange juice? Coffee or milk? Would raspberry jam be all right or would I rather have wild honey?

I told her all of it sounded good, went back to the living-room, called the Brulard, asked for 416.

“That party does not an-swer,” the gal at the switchboard said presently. “Would you care to leave a message?”

I said I’d like to be connected with Mister Ashmore.

Pat came on. “Security. Ashmore speaking.”

“Gil Vine, Pat.”

“Your chickadees have flew, Gilbert. They tried t’get room service, but you know we ain’t had room service on Sundays here since FDR was a freshman.”

“Ouww! They went out for scup scoff?”

“Well, yeah. But not together. Little Goldilocks, the looker with the glamorous gams — say, I just remembered who she looks like — that Millett babe—”

“Set a day.”

“She does, though. Well, she comes kitin’ down th’ stairs an’ out, an’ grabs a cab. About th’ time her taxi is pullin’ away, the other one bounces out of the elevator and chases after her. What kind of ring-around-a-rosie goes on, huh, Gil? You wouldn’t get th’ Brulard messed up in no scandal, nothin’ like that, would you?”

“Everything sweet and clean, Pat. But I’ll make you a small side bet.”

“What about?”

“Ten bucks says you can’t locate the hackie who took Little Goldilocks away — and find out where he took her.”

“That ain’t a bet. That’s a new pair of kicks. Sure. Where you want me to call you?”

I gave him Ruth’s number, went in the john, and scrubbed up. I felt a little woozy, first time since getting up. I couldn’t tell whether it was the aftereffects of that crack with the symbol of passion, or whether I was just punchy from so many bad breaks.

Calling the office didn’t make me perk up any. Tim was groggy from having been up past his bedtime, unstrung by the news a warrant was out for me and I was subject to instant arrest and detention if I showed up at the Plaza Royale.

“Hacklin swore out the warrant, Gil. Right after you took off. The blues are in on the case now, and Harry Weissman’s burned to a cinder about your not callin’ him in, yourself.”

“Oh! What a bee-yutiful morn-ing.” I gave him the Moore number. “I’m a trifle indisposed at the moment so I won’t rush over to try on my new bracelets. Was there anything else? Gowriss picked up, yet?”

“Nah. They wrote him off, skipper. Accordin’ to Schneider this’s strickly a cream passion hell.”

“What culture the man has! What insight! Did you hear from Ada?”

“Oh, yuh, yuh. I nearly forgot. Something about wax on a bedspread. From room two-o-one-o.”

“Yaker!”

“I couldn’t know what you was after, Chief, but that guest checked out last night around ten-thirty.”

Chapter twenty-five:

Needle of jealousy

When it comes to solving a crime passionnel there’s one thing beats all the scientific equipment criminologists can bring to bear. Give the hommy experts their fluorescent dusting-powder, their spectroscopic examination of a cross-section of a hair, throw in that sodium pentothal truth-serum for good measure. I’ll take the jealous wench and beat ’em to the answer four times out of five.

But the hammer and tongs can’t be used; the proper instrument is the needle.

So after I slid my knees under the nook table with its cheery breakfast cloth and gay china, when I’d duly complimented my hostess on the luscious smells of bacon and coffee, I went to work.

“When was the last time you talked to Lanerd?”

“Yesterday afternoon. About three. At the office.” She filled her coffee cup too full, sopped the saucer dry with a paper napkin. “Is the omelette all right?”

“Wonderful.” It wasn’t quite that good. But I’d have relished pancakes of tar paper at that point.

“We had a spat, at the office. I opened a letter he didn’t think I should have; I open all his mail except the ones specifically marked ‘Personal’; usually he shows me those, except the ones from girls. This letter was from a bank. It mentioned the name of a gentleman at its branch in Rio de Janeiro in case Mister Lanerd wished to take up any matters about the fifty-thousand-dollar letter of credit. We-e-ell! I hadn’t heard anything about any trip to Rio, but I could guess what it meant. The Icequadrilles are due to open in Brazil, fifteenth of next month.”

I tried not to think of the place Lanerd had actually had his ticket punched for — that evil-smelling autopsy room down on Twenty-Sixth, where they take all suspected ’cides. “Mushrooms’re out of this world.”

“He loves them.” She caught herself. “What really made him mad, I called Marge to ask if she’d relay the dope about the man in Rio. Course she didn’t know anything about a projected trip, either, and naturally I knew she didn’t, but I had to put her wise.”

“Why?”

“She’s the only one who can handle him at all. If I want to keep him from doing something that’s bad for his health or his business, I might as well talk to the statue of General Sherman, across from the Plaza Royale.”

I thought as things stood, she might. But I just helped myself to more of the crisp bacon.

“So I did let Marge know what marched. She’d just finished thanking me and saying she’d bustle right in and throw a monkey wrench where it would do the most good, when Dow came in the office and overheard me.” Ruth gazed drearily at me over her cup. “I’d better tell you about Dow and me.”

“Not necessary, is it?” I couldn’t bring myself to casually mention that he was dead.

“I’d feel better if I told somebody. You seem to understand, sort of. I want to tell you.”

She did, while the simple act of buttering toast made me think of that steak knife being brandished by a shrewd Prosecutor before a crowded courtroom.

“Dow’s different from most men. Not because he’s always having affairs; I guess most men do, one time or another. But he’s never serious; he never even pretends to be with anyone except Marge. He always tells a girl he’s devoted to Marge, wouldn’t dream of leaving her for any other woman. I know; he told me — and I was idiot enough to fall in love with him in spite of it. The secretary he had before I got the job, she had a nervous breakdown, went completely to pieces, simply because she thought he’d change his mind, after sleeping with her a few times, and leave his wife. Of course he didn’t.”

I couldn’t think of any comment that wouldn’t sound like Simple Simon.

She spilled marmalade on the tablecloth; all I could see were dime-size spots of wax dropped on a bedspread by someone coating finger tips with wax so they wouldn’t leave any prints.

She scraped up the jelly. “It’s been the same with singers and actresses on his radio and television shows. He’d take one to dinner, and before dessert she’d know he was the most interesting man she’d ever met. Or they’d go dancing, really he’s as good as most professionals. Or sailing or skiing or flying; he’s good at pretty near everything exciting that most people only read about or talk about.”

I couldn’t dispute it.

“He’s so thoughtful and so — I don’t know — he has a flair for doing little things to please a girl.” She sighed at some intimate reminiscence. “There’d be presents, too, flowers, baskets of wine, things like that Stardust compact he gave Tildy. Next thing, the girl would be calling up two or three times a day, asking when he was coming up to her apartment. I had to talk to the poor things; it made me angry at him and sorry for them and bitter at myself.”

“Why didn’t Mrs. Lanerd divorce him?”

“She plain won’t. She knows he’ll always come home to her eventually. He always has, until Tildy put a spell on him. Give her credit; she didn’t hide the fact she was after him. I was in the studio the night Jeff introduced her to Marge. Tildy came right out with it. Laughing, but serious underneath it, you know: ‘Your husband’s absolutely the most attractive man I’ve ever known, Mrs. Lanerd. I believe I’ll try to snare him away from you.’”

“What’d Mrs. Lanerd say to that?”

“Don’t remember exactly. She laughed, too. Then there was some remark about preferring to put a knife in his gallivanting heart before she let him put a wedding ring on another girl’s finger. Kidding like. But she recognized the danger. She went to lunch with Jeff to question him about Tildy. She had Keith Walch, Tildy’s manager, out to dinner at Manhasset to see what he could suggest. She even tried to influence her through that firebrand maid, Nikky Narian. Marge nearly got her eyes scratched out for trying to tell Tildy where to head in.”

I wondered how much of it Ruth would tell Hacklin & Co., when they buzzed her door, as they were certain to do almost any minute. “You think the South American trip was for the purpose of Lanerd’s getting a divorce down there?”

“Yes.” She got up abruptly, went to the stove, began clattering pans. “I don’t know what there is about Tildy. They do have a lot in common; they’re both hipped on sports. And they’re both from Kentucky, least he was born there and she’s moved there—”

“Where’d he come from? Lexington?”

“Near there. Bourbon County. North Middletown.”

“Hm.” I told her about the Seven-for-a-secret note I’d left with Tildy at the Brulard. “Any idea who might have signed that ‘Lx’?”

“Oh, Dow, I suppose. They have a sort of code, all abbreviations. Not secret, just affectionate. She’d call up to leave a message for him and say, ‘Tell him Lx will be late.’ Or he’ll send her a crate of orchids with nothing but ‘Lx’ on the card. Doesn’t have any significance. Only a reference to the Bluegrass they’re both so fond of.”

I said I guessed it was just jive-talk, no meaning. Had she seen any note on the floor when she came in and found me cooled?

No. She’d waited for Lanerd to call. Waited and hoped and waited some more. She hadn’t phoned his suite because she supposed the police would be there, as I’d warped her. She’d come straight to her apartment from the hotel so she hadn’t eaten.

Around three she decided to go down to the delicatessen on the corner of Broadway to get a sandwich and some of the mushrooms Lanerd liked so much. She’d left her door open because she thought, though he had a key to her place, that he might not have it with him.

She’d only been away ten minutes at most. When she came in and saw me on the floor, she thought surely I was dead. She called Lanerd’s doctor, he’d attended her several times, he came right over.

There’d been no envelope on the floor when she found me, she was positive about that.

I asked if I could dry the dishes. She shook her head; it was time for me to lie down.

“Just for the record,” I told her, “let this be the first time a Vine has refused that kind of an offer in a girl’s apartment. But I’ll take a check for a rainy day.”

She untensed enough to laugh. “All right.”

The phone rang. It was Pat Ashmore.

“I’m wearin’ those new brogans already, Gil.”

“Find him?”

“Lemme read ya, right off his trip-record card: ‘Trip number eight. Eleven twenty-five ayem. One passenger. No bags. From Hotel Brulard. To Gotham Athletic.’”

“Yair?”

“Wait. This is what the jockey says. She asks him to wait. She goes inside. Comes right out again. Says to the jock, ‘They don’t know where he is! Dear Lord, isn’t there anybody who can help me?’”

“Give that man five silver dollars. He’s earned it, Pat.”

“There’s more. Lissen. The hackie gets worried about her. Asks what can he do to help her. She answers nobody can help her, really. Finely she decides he should drop her at the Continental Television Building. So that’s what he does. At eleven forty-five. Fare, seventy cents.”

“Neat and complete.” In jest I added, “How big a tip?”

“A cuter,” he said. “That what you wanted?”

“Come around to the P-R on your day off,” I told him. “Bring your girl. Bring your family. You can have anything you want except the dinner check.”

Chapter twenty-six:

Blubbering woman

My aching skull was a booming reminder that the person who’d tried to eliminate me only a few hours before would probably try again.

The sunlight was bright on the Broadway corner where I waited for a bus. The Sunday afternoon strollers were out in force. It seemed an unlikely spot for an attack. Still, I watched every solitary male who passed.

If it was Gowriss who’d trailed me from Manhasset, shot up my car in Brooklyn, and left me in a West Side apartment en route to the mortuary, probably I couldn’t do much more to put him out of circulation than the badges were supposed to be doing. Still, what possible motive could the narcotic addict have had for wanting me dead? It couldn’t be because of fear Tildy’d told me about him; presumably he already knew she’d told the DAides.

I couldn’t rub Gowriss off the slate completely. He was a known killer. He had shot Johnny the Grocer. But those paid droppers seldom use knives, and when they do it’s a six-inch spring blade, not a steak knife. And no cold-blooded ambusher would have left me lying there in Ruth Moore’s hallway without making sure I was finished.

Maxie claimed to have seen a man who looked like Gowriss, in the hotel. No one else had. Tim didn’t believe him. The guy Tildy’d described wasn’t remotely like the thin, sallow-skinned dope-user described in the circular. Tildy might be in danger from Gowriss; I didn’t think I was.

The only tangible signs pointed in Yaker’s direction. Tildy’s description. The wax on the spread. His oddly timed appearance at Lanerd’s suite, while I was there.

Before I left, I’d asked Ruth about Roy Y. She didn’t know much. Lanerd was acquainted with him but not too well. Yaker was a transparent bore. Made passes at everything in skirts. Had attempted to seduce Ruth in Lanerd’s office once. But what I’d heard outside his door while those con girls were with him, that scarcely matched up with murderous intent. Granting that a lustful heart, by whatever name you call it, has no conscience.

And Lanerd? He could have followed me in a cab from his home, if he’d been alive then. But flatly impossible for him to have made that gun play on Atlantic Avenue; his body’d been discovered before that. No, the party who’d cracked that statuette on my cranium was still up and about.

Hacklin and Schneider would be ready to accept the adman’s death as suicide. I couldn’t buy any part of it.

His departure from this vale certainly would hit a lot of people hard. I was really sorry for Marge, Tildy, Ruth. More for Marge than Tildy; she’d still have her career. And Ruth — She seemed to me to be the self-reliant sort who could take it in her stride.

Possibly there were others I didn’t know about who’d miss him, in the same way. As Emile would say: Quel homme!

Until I reached the Continental Television Building, it hadn’t been impressed on me what a blow Mr. Giveaway’s passing might be to some of the men who’d been close to him. Jeff MacGregory, for one.

When I asked where I might find him, they directed me to studio seven, a cute little salle the size of our Blue Ballroom.

A child’s building-block, big as a trunk, was fixed to a sign: Build Health with Munchies. On a raised platform, a couple dozen shirt-sleeved musicians were rustling scores on their racks, tuning violins, blowing dixieland on trumpets. At the other end of the studio a line of swim-suited show gals were prancing with beach parasols before a theater-size movie screen with a slide of Jones Beach on it. A pint-size taptress did cartwheels. A quintette of Cubans in white frilled camisoles twanged and sang Siboney. Nice quiet atmosphere for a head which already had tom-tom accompaniment!

An announcer directed me to the glass-paneled privacy of the control room. Three owlish young men were disagreeable about MacGregory. He wasn’t there. He was “upstairs somewhere.” This was a rehearsal, couldn’t I see that? One of them finally escorted me to a door marked: No Admittance, Clients Only.

Up a flight of stairs, behind a soundproofed door, looking down through a picture window on the pleasant pandemonium of the studio, was a grim MacGregory. He was more gaudily gotten up than the first time I saw him, but his expression wasn’t gaudy. He slumped in a preview chair, chin on chest, hand over eyes.

“Oh! My God!” He glowered at me. “Do I have to take you, too?”

“Not if I can locate Miss Millett.”

“She’s not here.” He leaned over, held his head in both hands. “She’s gone over to Iceville. To see Keith. She said you told her Dow’s dead!”

“Yair.” It didn’t seem reasonable for him to be so utterly despondent, now Marge was a widow. “What’d Miss Millett want here?”

“Two thousand fish. I don’t carry that kind of money around in my pants,” he said dourly. “By this time next week I’ll be lucky if I’ve got two bits! She’s ruined me!”

“Think she shot Lanerd?”

He stood up slowly. “I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. I was thinking how she’s mucked up the program. First place, she comes breezing in here with about as much chance of being unnoticed as a tuba player carrying two tubas. She asks for me; right off everybody begins the buzz-buzz about her being Miss Hands on Stack O’ Jack! Mystery — gone to hell in a handbasket! Boss — ditto, I guess!” He cursed with deep feeling. “And then she wants me to dig up dough enough for her to get to Brazil.”

“Messes things up, yair. Show must go on. All that—”

“How, for crysake, can it go on when there’s no Mystery Girl? Even if there was a mystery any longer, which there wouldn’t be!” He smoldered.

“She have anything to say about Lanerd?”

“I couldn’t understand half what she was blubbering about, she was so overwrought.” He made an angry gesture of dismissal, as if to shove the whole tangle out of his mind for the time being. “You can ask her yourself, if you hustle; she only left for Iceville ten minutes ago. Keith won’t have that kind of cash on him, either. Take him a while to get it.”

“Going to South America, is she?”

“She babbled about Montreal, Havana, London. But her company’s going to Brazil, so I s’pose she’ll head there. She did say it made absolutely no damn difference where she went; she’d be hunted just the same.”

“Hunted? Yair.” She’d been warned about keeping away from cops; now she couldn’t go to them for protection.

“I told her she better hike straight to a hospital, get some rest. She thought I meant maybe she was cracking up. ‘No, Jeff, I’m not going mad.’” He did a good job of imitating her. “‘I wish I could go mad. It would be better than having to think of the terrible thing I’ve done.’ What you going to do with a star who hands you a line like that?”

“You have other problems, too.” I waved at the Munchie rehearsals.

“Hell, yes.” He added in the surliest tone, “Don’t go quoting me as saying she confessed.”

“I won’t.”

“She didn’t.”

He was afraid he’d said too much.

“All right, so she didn’t. How’d Mrs. Lanerd stand up to the news about her husband?”

A punch in the jaw wouldn’t have hit him as hard. “Marge might have grown to dislike the bastard, in time, if he’d lived,” he said dejectedly, “but now she’ll never forget him.”

I didn’t contradict him.

Chapter twenty-seven:

Clues from a wallet

A patrol car with two stony-eyed sergeants idled before the Continental Building as I left. The sight of a uniform wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been, considering the danger I was in.

There was enough ringing in my ears without having to listen to a bawling-out from Hacklin or Reidy Duman or Harry Weissman for having stayed the hand of authority in its descent on Ruth or Auguste or Edie. It wouldn’t have helped my headache to explain how my Buick happened to stand on a Brooklyn corner with its windshield riddled.

It struck me forcibly, at the sight of those minions of the law, that maybe I’d been betting my cards too strong. When the showdown came I might look pretty silly, backing my judgment against all the badges. But I couldn’t afford to drop; I had so much at stake I’d have to play it out, regardless.

Keith Walch wasn’t at Iceville when I got to the big rink on West Fifty-Second. About a dozen girls in short white skirts and high white shoes, swinging long colored capes from their shoulders, swooped around the ice; Over the Waves came out of a wire recorder like a wheezy carousel. It was cool in there after the Death Valley temperature of the street; the butterfly capes and the easy, rhythmic movements were soothing to watch.

One of the cuties swooped over, stopped in a silvery spray of ice. Mister Walch? She didn’t know; she thought he might be in the Iceville office with Miss Millett. She bobbed her head in the direction of the office.

It was behind a flimsy gypsum-board partition with a thin, jerry-built door. Red paint notified the unauthorized to Keep Out — Millett Enterprises, Inc. The door wasn’t open but it didn’t have to be for the voice inside to penetrate. I couldn’t hear what the speaker was saying until I nursed the knob around noiselessly, pushed gently.

It was Walch. On the phone. In no genial frame of mind. “... they pick him up around half past ’leven last night, gallopin’ up Park Avenuh with nothin’ on ’cept his shorts, screamin’ bloody murder... sure, he was schwocked to th’ scuppers... cop took him back up to the apartment where those cream puffs ’f yours put the snatch on his suitcases, his clothes, his cush... huh?”

The door was at one end of a storeroom cluttered with theatrical trunks, spotlights, piles of three-sheet posters showing the Incomparable Tildy doing a split, five feet above the ice.

The agent howled like a wounded weasel. “... it means a hell of a lot to me... th’ cream puff who held him while th’ other one made off with his stuff was still there, gettin’ her clothes on... cop hadda run her in, too, an’ of course she counters by swearin’ out a complaint Yaker tried to rape her... he couldn’t get Lanerd at the hotel so he called me at th’ club. I spent all night with th’ dumb creep, diggin’ up bail, gettin’ a legal eagle to work on th’ cream puff, hirin’ a doc to examine her, make sure she hadn’t been hurt... now lissen, I got enough snafus to straighten out, without... huh?”

I didn’t make any undue commotion crossing to the opposite end of the storeroom.

“... yes, goddam it, all night... they wouldn’t let him go until she made a statement denying her assault charge... deal we finally made at five this morning was, if he gets his clothes back — I hadda get one of my suits from the club for him — an’ the suitcases, he’ll forget about the money in his wallet, eighteen hundred smackers, a nice price for a cream puff, godsake... but she claims she don’t know how to contact her chum-bum, except through you... so they’re both to meet y’ there at six o’clock... now lissen!”

He did the listening, for the length of time it took me to get where I could see in the office. He was alone, sitting on the small of his spine in a swivel chair with one foot cocked up on top of a desk drawer. He wore a mauve jacket over a lime-tinted sport shirt. He heard me or saw me, the second I saw him.

“... hold everything,” he snarled at the phone, “somebody jus’ opened a manhole, a big stink blew in... I’ll call y’ back.” He slammed the receiver down viciously. “Why, damn you! Don’t you get enough key-holing in your own dump? You gotta come over here?”

“Where’s Tildy?” There were a dozen glossy-print photographs of her tacked up on the partition; on the desk beside a pair of rocker-blade skates, a bronze paperweight with the familiar twirled-out skirt and shapely legs!

“Where you won’t find her, bud.” He came up out of the chair, his face mottling. “Half a mind to mark you up good; takin’ her to the Brulard last night, you—”

“You haven’t even half a mind if you think there was any monkey business.”

He grabbed one of the skates, swung it high. I had no choice. I gave the desk a shove. It pinned him against the chair. He threw the skate. I had a forearm up. It numbed my wrist so for a few seconds I thought it was broken.

I went across the desk at him. He was backed up against the partition. When I bounced knuckles off his chops, his head banged one of those photos of Tildy. I nailed him again on the rebound. A good solid bone-to-bone sock. He went down. The chair went over. The oak arm clipped him as it toppled. His head bobbled around as if his neck was broken.

After I made sure my wrist wasn’t, I shut the door, turned the key on the inside. In case any of his employees barged in and couldn’t see my side of it.

Then I looked around for a lead to Tildy. I frisked him. Went through his pockets, his wallet. What a collection!

Bills, letter from a skate manufacturer with a check in it, letter from a girl who’d been in the Icequadrille line asking for a loan, snapshots of girls, one of a boy wearing a polar-bear-cub costume, press clippings on Skate Mates, a deposition taken by some law firm in a damage suit, a typed report of a metabolism test he’d taken at a hospital recently, business cards from artists, costumers, musicians, advertising men, electricians — nothing about Tildy or where she might have gone.

I put the stuff back in the wallet, in his pockets, rummaged the desk. The only item which might have been of interest was the Manhattan Telephone Directory. Evidently he had the habit of scribbling numbers on the front cover of the phone book. There was one number that had been scribbled within a matter of minutes; it was in ink from a ball-point pen; it smudged a little when I rubbed my thumb across it.

A Lafayette number. I dialed it just on that outside chance. A gravel-voice gent at the other end said, “Blazer — Bill Every speaking.”

Blazer. The Blue Blazer, where Johnny the Grocer had rested his head in a puddle of blood! “Edie Eberlein there?”

“No,” stated Mister Every. “She was. But she stepped out for a short Coke or somethin’. She might be back. Want me to say who called?”

“Walch,” I said. “Keith Walch.”

Chapter twenty-eight:

Bloody brawl

Renowned names smirked from paint-peeling signs over narrow doorways: Belmont, Grand, Gotham, Plaza. The coy humor of those Bowery flophouse proprietors in naming their stenchy hospices after uptown hotels had slight appeal for me at the moment. My own sense of humor was buckling at the knees. I paid off the taxi on a sidewalk dappled with sunlight and decorated with refuse moderne, walked past hock shops and open-air beef stewdios to the Blue Blazer.

I hadn’t waited for Walch to come out of his coma. Nothing would have been gained unless he’d undergone a change of heart and told me where to find Tildy; after our donnybrook, that didn’t seem likely.

There wasn’t much chance he’d swear out any complaint against me. Only result in bad publicity for his star; be enough of that anyhow, especially if Hacklin hadn’t impounded that farewell note to keep it out of the papers.

But the agent would be no bonus when it came to getting a statement out of Tildy to clear Auguste; wouldn’t be co-operative in uncovering Edie Eberlein’s part in last night’s fatalities. I’d have to do the digging on that, myself. Never had I felt less like it. What I craved was to stretch out on a soft sofa under low lights and sip a tall rum bomba. With Ruth Moore on the side.

The Blue Blazer was one of those drums where the tables are covered with red-checkered cloths, the waiters wear ankle-length aprons, and the straight drinks wouldn’t fill a thimble. It might have been decorated by a drunken painter. A long, black-walnut bar ran along one side; even at that early hour elbow parkage was at a premium.

I couldn’t see either La Eberlein or Roy Yaker, so I wedged myself in between a chief petty officer and a tubby little butterball reciting ribald limericks in a loud voice to anyone who’d listen. Talk about a melting pot! But simmering!

When the gnome-faced Hibernian in a candy-striped shirt brought me my rum sour, I asked him where it was the shooting had taken place. He leaned over the bar to point out a phone booth down by the washrooms.

“Second booth, where the new glass is in.” He would have been pleased to give gory details. “Johnny’d been right here at th’ bar, no more’n a cork pop from where you’re standin’ now. Tommy, there, just give him a ryeball on th’ house,” like an impresario he waved at a lanky barman with handlebar mustaches, evidently a celebrity since the assassination.

I would have asked whether Miss Eberlein had been present at the time of the gunplay, but something told me my inquiry would not have been courteously received. I drifted toward the phone booth. Halfway there, I spotted Edie. She wore black, with a rope of pearls big enough for an elephant’s collar. She was at a table with a brassy babe in a vermilion getup with a neckline that plunged way down to there, obviously not the kind of damsel discussed in polite circles of Burlington, Vermont.

They were ten tables away. Intervening quaffing and laffing made it impossible to hear what Edie was saying. But there were three Tom Collins glasses on their table.

I headed for a door demurely labeled: Used Beer Department, bumped into Yaker coming out.

He’d cut himself shaving. He smelled like a bar sink. The fawn gabardine he’d borrowed from Walch fitted him like a Cub Scout uniform. He boggled at me, glassy-eyed, trying to place me. I went in the men’s room, gave him a minute to wend his way between the cram-jammed tables, went out again.

He was dunking his nose in the Collins, listening to a tongue-lashing from Edie, when I pulled up a spare chair. I thought La Eberlein was going to keel over with apoplexy. She was practically speechless, but the few choice epithets she did sputter out were really pier-six stuff.

I didn’t fool around. “That key, Miss E. One I got out of your bag.”

“You got a nerve like a ulcerated tooth. Comin’ to my table without bein’—”

“Remember? You said the guest gave the key to you. I asked the guest. She said she never gave it to you.”

Plunging Neckline was dumfounded and scared; she wanted out. Yaker pawed soddenly at liquor dribbling off his chin. Edie cursed me till she ran short of breath. She clenched her glass as if to hurl the drink in my face. I did what I could to appear calm and unflustered. My insides were doing nip-ups; Edie’s loud scrawking was attracting the attention of several meaneyed waiters.

“Where’d you get that 21MM key, Edie?”

“You can’t crash my party an’ browbeat me, you thick dick!” she stormed. “Try to pin anything on me, I’ll teach you to mind your own goddam business.” She stabbed an accusing finger at Yaker. “He gimme that key. An’ I can prove it.”

Yaker was too groggy to use discretion. “You’re a lousy liar!” he shouted at her. “I never gave you any—” Two husky waiters laid ungentle hands on him, hauled him to his feet.

He took a feeble swing at one. The other grabbed Yaker’s arm, twisted it up behind his back. Yaker lunged. The table tipped. Glasses smashed. Plunging Neckline shrieked, flopped to the floor. Edie urged the waiters to throw me out, too. It was a merry melee.

I’m well aware what the Hollywood version of a private eye would have done at that point. He’d have smashed the bottom off a club soda bottle, used it to defend himself against all comers. Or, in some miraculous fashion, knocked heads together until the bouncers whined for mercy. I wasn’t up to that stouthearted stuff right then. If ever.

I’d had a sufficiency of rough and tumble for one twenty-four-hour period. Besides, I wanted to get Yaker out alive; it began to look as if they’d tear his arms off and beat him to death with ’em; three of them were muscling him — and for a guy who’d started with an alcoholic handicap, he was putting up a noble scrap.

The headwaiter steamed over with two more bulky-chested waiters. Edie indicated I was the root of the fracas. The waiters circled behind me.

I stood still. “Local 901?” I asked.

That gave them pause. One of the circlers put his hand on my shoulder, but he didn’t grab me. They were all members of that club, had to be. They thought I might hold a union card, too.

“Whassa trouble here?” The head man directed his question to me.

“Any you boys know Auguste Fessler?” After twenty years in the business, one or the other of them should have.

The waiter who had a hammerlock on Yaker called, “Works at the Plaza Royale? Yeah. I know Auguste.”

I talked fast. There’s been a slight misunderstanding. If the lady’d been offended, we — I included Yaker in my apology — begged her pardon. It had all occurred simply because I’d been trying to get a waiter friend of mine, Auguste, out of a serious foul-up with the cops. I handed a ten to the headwaiter. “Take the check and breakage out, split the difference with the boys, huh?” They let us go. Edie poured vials of scorn on them for not batting our teeth in. But they didn’t want any more commotion; the ten-spot tempered their wrath. They helped me lead Yaker out to the street.

He was a mess. A blossoming shiner. Nosebleed on Keith Walch’s fawn lapels. A loose tooth or a cut lip or both. But the fight had partly sobered him. He sobbed about scandal; his wife would kill him if she found out, so on.

We piled in a taxi. He blubbered gratitude for getting him out in one piece.

“Gotham Athletic,” I told the driver. Then I put it to Yaker. “What’s with that key? Did you give it to her, no kidding?”

“No. I gave her my key. Like a dumb fool. So those kids could go up to my suite while I was still downstairs at the banquet.”

He stuck to it. I thought he was leveling. He was a badly frightened man. All he wanted was to get straightened out, get his luggage, and go back to Philadelphia without having his family find out about the hassle.

I told him he’d have to get Walch to arrange about his belongings. But when we got to the club, Walch wasn’t there. And wouldn’t be, according to the ducal clerk.

“Mister Walch is out of town. Just left, few minutes ago.”

“Yair? Where?”

“Couldn’t say, sir.”

“Kentucky, maybe?”

He smiled as if he was on some amusing secret. “He does sometimes go there; that’s a fact.”

Chapter twenty-nine:

Case of jitters

I’ve seen the law of averages repealed too often to put much faith in it. All the same, it did seem to apply to Roy Yaker. What the odds would be against there having been another big, blond, ruddy-faced guy of his height and build on the twenty-first floor the previous night, I couldn’t estimate. Million to one wouldn’t have been far off.

Of course, if he’d been with Edie’s cream puffs all the time after leaving the hotel until his Lady Godiva performance on Park Avenue, he couldn’t very well have been the lad who trailed me from Manhasset. Or shot up my bus on Atlantic Avenue.

But there were too many things, besides that key I’d taken from Edie, that he wasn’t able to clear up. Or willing to.

When we left the Gotham, he turned to me in despair.

“Now what the hell am I going to do? I haven’t any clothes or any money! I can’t get in Walch’s room if he’s not in town! I can’t go back home without any luggage!”

I told him the first thing he needed was to get cleaned up, sobered up. I knew the place, if he’d agree to stay there until I decided it was okay.

He had some friends in town, plenty more in Philly, but he didn’t want to let any of them know about his fix, for fear it would get back to his wife. So he agreed.

In five minutes we were at Pud Hoffman’s Finnish Baths. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to farm out a jitter case to Pud; we had a routine established. Take away every stitch of the patient’s clothing. Stick him in the steam room until he was so weak he couldn’t get away without crutches. Let him sleep.

While Yaker was undressing I inquired about the wax spots on his spread. Either he was completely in the dark about them or else he was a more cagey customer than I rated him.

I told him what I thought the wax had been used for; to cover fingerprints so a murderer couldn’t be traced. That threw him. He hadn’t known about any murder. Hadn’t ever been in 21MM at all. Knew Tildy Millett by sight and by name, but had never met her.

Just before Pud shoved him in the steam room I mentioned Lanerd’s death. Yaker got so sick to his stomach I thought he was having convulsions. Pud thought he’d wilt if that heat hit him then; we put him in bed. He fell into a heavy sleep of nervous exhaustion without a twitch.

It’s easy to fake a faint. Something else again to artificially induce an abdominal reaction like that. If the big lunk lying so limply on Pud’s cot had sliced one man and blown another’s brains out, Snow White was Baby Face Nelson in disguise.

I called Tim. He was in shape for a strait jacket, trying to hold the wheel in my absence. If I would just hike back in a hurry, probably it could all be smoothed over with the front office. The lab boys had definitely determined Lanerd had suicided. The flare test showed powder traces on his right hand. His prints were on the laundry hamper too. And had I heard, that coat, the cream-colored dilly with the chocolate checks?

“Whose was it? Reidy’s?”

“Ha, ha.” A hollow chuckle. “Zingy traced it. Through the valet. It’s Lanerd’s. Matter of fact it was hangin’ up in his closet when this Schneider looks for it.”

“So they think it’s open and shut?”

“There were bloodstains on the coat, Chief. Jeeze, what more you want?”

“I don’t know, Tim.” I didn’t. “Fran, maybe. She in?”

“I let her off until midnight. She was on eighteen hours yesterday.”

“Yair. ’S right. Any info about T.M.?”

“Hacklin’s had word from her agent. He put her on board Lanerd’s yacht where she’ll be safe from this Gowriss until she has to testify before the Grand Jury tomorrow. Still, the reporters won’t be able to pester her.”

“‘Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine.’”

“Huh?”

“A quote of no significance, Tim.”

“Lissen, Chief. You haven’t still got that bee in y’r bonnet about Lanerd’s havin’ been murdered!”

“Yair. I have. And it’s going to sting somebody yet.” I told him what I had in mind. What Lanerd had told Hacklin on the phone just before he died.

At LaGuardia the next plane for Cincinnati was at nine peeyem. That left time for a leisurely session at the airport barbershop. While I waited for the white chair, I skimmed the early edition of our most sedate journal. They’d page-oned it: Dow Lanerd Found Dead in Hotel Suite.

The copy desk had cut conjecture to the bone. The facts were accurate, far as they went. The famed Mr. Giveaway, promoter and developer of many leading radio and television programs had been discovered lying on the floor of a bathroom in his suite at the Plaza Royale, Fifth Avenue home of many socially prominent. He had been shot in the right temple by his own automatic pistol; preliminary police reports indicated the president of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright, internationally influential advertising agents, had shot himself.

The assistant medical examiner placed the time of death at approximately nine p.m., Saturday evening. An informant at the office of the District Attorney suggested that the executive’s death might have been due to a temporarily unbalanced mental condition, following a fatal encounter with a member of the Prosecutor’s staff a short time before the suicide.

There was a guarded reference to a violent dispute in connection with an unnamed woman who was being sought for questioning.

Business and club associates of Lanerd professed the usual profound shock and sorrow, denied all knowledge of financial or domestic difficulties in the life of “the most successful advertising man of the decade.” Mrs. Lanerd, prostrated by the blow, could not be reached for comment.

Reading between the lines, there remained an impression of a drunken brawl in some girl’s room, a fight and a fatality, followed by remorse and suicide. All very commonplace. Very unfortunate. Very silly.

There was nothing concerning the note Tildy’d left for him, so people wouldn’t begin to get ideas about the Plaza Royale being a cozy spot to pitch a love nest. That was the only break the hotel got. Except that Auguste wasn’t mentioned.

Under the lather and the hot towel, I went over it all. Lanerd, Auguste, Roffis, Gowriss, Ruth, Yaker, Edie, Walch, Marge, MacGregory, Nikky, Tildy. Aussi, the man in the taxi!

All the juice I squeezed out of it was that in some strange manner, the blasting of a police informer down on the Bowery six days ago was connected with the death of a millionaire adman on Fifth Avenue. It didn’t add up.

I totaled the columns over again while I watched the gas trucks under the wings of the DC6; later, as I marched up the ramp, grinned at the seductive sally in the stewardess uniform, strapped on my belt. I was still ponderin’ when we zoomed over the honeycomb of lighted windows that was New York, zipped across the strip of burnished metal that was the Hudson, gained altitude for the mountains.

By the time we came down through a threatening thunderstorm, three hours later, to the field beside the Ohio, I’d reached one certain conclusion. Tildy Millett was the core of it; she probably knew the killer; certainly she knew what the cryptic “Never forget four” meant.

At Cincinnati there was half an hour before the DC3 left for Lexington. I pushed through a call to New York, to Fran.

She was contrite about letting Tildy get away from her at the Brulard. The skate star had called a bellman to see if he could buy her a hairbrush on Sunday; while the bellman had the door open, Tildy’d simply slipped out and run down the stairs.

Fran’d had a horrible night with Tildy. It had taken the skater hours to get to sleep. Hours of tears, nerves, incoherencies. Even after the Rip Van Winkles had taken effect, the star of the Icequadrilles had tossed and writhed and moaned and talked in her uneasy slumber.

Fran couldn’t make much out of it, beyond the constant calling for Dow — Dow — Dow. “Oh, one thing, Mister V. About half past three, when I thought she was quieting down, she began to laugh like a maniac.”

“In her sleep?”

“Sound asleep. Then she said, very clearly and bitterly, as if reproaching him, ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, hahahaha.’ It made my skin crawl to listen to her.”

“That was all? No more? Just one and two. No four? Or seven?”

“That was all. She did fall asleep then.”

“Yair. Well. Go thou and do likewise. Thanks for a tough job.”

“I’m not kidding. It was. I wish you’d stayed there, yourself!”

“So do I. ’Night.”

Chapter thirty:

Shotgun and hatchet

It was a rough jaunt. Night flights are usually smoother than day flying but that thunderstorm was chasing us all the way to the Bluegrass. The bumpy trip may have contributed to my gloom. When they pulled the ramp over to us at Lexington, the mercury was pole-vaulting up over the ninety mark. And I had cold feet.

If I didn’t hurt anyone but myself it wouldn’t be so bad to canter around investigating a couple of grisly homicides in an entirely different direction from that taken by the duly constituted authorities. But if I was putting another person’s life in danger, and there seemed to be better than an even chance I was doing just that, then I had to consider the consequences. I did so, hence my gloom.

It was all so lucid, way they figured it. Roffis stabbed in a scuffle because he tried to prevent Tildy and Dow from taking her belongings with her, en route to Rio and a divorce cum marriage. Auguste’s being given the compact to say he knew nothing about the guard’s death. Tildy’s subsequent turndown of her Casanova. His resulting suicide.

If I hadn’t known about the wax spots and the finger marks — which weren’t fingerprints — on Tildy’s bedroom door, if it wasn’t for being trailed and shot at by someone who couldn’t have been Dow L., I might have accepted Hacklin’s view. As it was, I couldn’t shake off a conviction that the killer was still up and about, that there’d be another murder if I didn’t find the answer, but sudden.

“One for sorrow, two for mirth.” It clattered around in my cranium like one of those idiotic singing commercials, while I coffeed and crullered. “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” What the hell? The tie-in with “Seven for a secret” and “Never forget four” seemed obvious. But the meaning was as murky as the skies when I went out to hire a hack.

Thunder grumbled. Lightning flashes made the white fences stand out as if floodlighted, against the vivid green of thoroughbred pastures. The heat was oppressive.

The cabdriver knew where Tildy Millett’s place was, sure. A show farm, Lovelawn was. Not many horses out there now, but he’d heard she planned to breed trotters next spring. Maybe she’d be breeding something else, too; there was talking about her latching up with some big advertising man.

I chuckled at his feeble jest. Would he know whether she’d come home by plane, today?

He wouldn’t know. He’d just come on at midnight. But it was only another mile down the pike; there were relatives living with her, if I wanted him to wait while I found out if she was there.

It began to rain. We passed a famous racing stud whose colors I’d bet on often at the tracks. The whitewashed stables and paddocks, the parklike grounds, the long white fences loping over gently rolling hills — very picturesque. The Land of Gracious Living. As advertised. I was in no mood to appreciate it.

Why had Lanerd said Tildy was on her way to Lexington when she hadn’t been? Why had Walch’s club thought he might be in Lexington, when he was on Long Island Sound? Most important, what followed “One for sorrow, two for mirth”?

The cabdriver said, “Here’s Lovelawn. Hey, they got the chain on.” He stopped.

Between fieldstone pillars a massive chain was padlocked.

“I better wait for you, huh? It’s quite a piece up to the house. Maybe there’s nobody home, after all.”

“Stick around ten minutes. If I’m not back by then, I’ll be staying awhile.” I gave him a buck over the fare.

He said okay, I’d get soaked, he’d lend me his slicker only if I didn’t come back he’d have no way to get it.

I thought the rain was letting up, much obliged.

There was a small lodge about a hundred yards inside the gate; no light showing there. If there was any illumination on at the big house I couldn’t distinguish it, though its four tall white columns and its two broad wings showed up clearly enough through the avenue of oaks, every time the lightning flashed.

No one could have heard me coming, with all that grumbling from the thunderheads, the hrrush of the downpour. But it would have been easy enough to see me, if anyone were watching for intruders.

When I got up to the crescent drive around in front of the house I couldn’t see a spark of light in any of the rooms. The brass knocker I used made a ludicrously tiny noise against the artillery overhead. After a minute I circled around the side, past a long screened porch, toward the garage. No sign of life. Except something that jumped my pulse beat in a rush!

In a lucky flash of lightning, two huge black dogs showed up like those single frames that are frozen on a screen when the projector is stopped. They were bounding in midair, racing toward me. Only fifty feet away. Pinschers. Doberman pinschers. The only kind of canine that’s absolutely forbidden in the hotel, because they’re so ferocious.

I’ve read all that mahooly about dogs never harming you, if you stand still and aren’t afraid of them. It did me no good whatsoever. If those galloping hellions could tell by a sense of smell whether a person was scared, I was a gone goose.

I made a leap for that screened porch. The door wasn’t hooked or locked. I made it inside by the thickness of my pants seat. The dogs leaped against the door. Their weight sagged the screen so I thought they’d come right through at me.

They were ugly animals. They weren’t playing at being ferocious. Their snarly growling was ample warning to stay where they couldn’t get at me.

If there was anyone in the Millet house, it seemed impossible for them not to hear the uproar those pinschers were making. True, it was coming down in buckets, water spouting off the roof like hydrants. Also, it was dark as a cave; the lightning had pretty well quit; it settled down to rain in a serious way.

I know — every well-equipped Private I is able to whip out a flashlight at a moment like that. I regretted my lack of foresight. I had two packs of paper matches and my lighter.

I knocked on the doors opening off the porch. Not the slightest stir.

I tapped on the glass with my lighter. Still nothing. Those damned dogs were ripping the screen door with their claws.

I tried the French doors. Locked. One of the dogs got his head and forepaws through the wire, set up a demoniac racket at not being able to get at me. But it wouldn’t be long.

Those French doors have two latch handles. I remembered an old trick from my schooldays; sometimes if I pulled both handles together, the doors would give enough to open, even when locked. I gave a good healthy tug. Bingo!

Then I pulled the door wide, snapped on my lighter to get a glimpse of the room inside. What I got a glimpse of was the moving muzzle of a shotgun swiveling toward me about five feet away!

No champion base stealer ever did a fancier fadeaway dive. I hadn’t hit the floor when the room blew up with a blast that made thunder sound like a bowling alley a block away.

When I hit the floor I went over in a shoulder roll, sure I was hit. The side of my face felt as if somebody’d patted it with a red-hot waffle iron.

The muzzle flare blinded me, but I swung a leg to kick up at the shotgun. I had to gamble it wasn’t a pump gun with half a dozen more shells ready to blow me apart.

A sliver of light showed at the bottom of the chair. I’d forgotten the lighter, in my dive. Somehow the flame was still burning, more than it usually did when I needed it. It had the slipcover of a chair on fire. That was nokay. I f the shotgunner got light enough to aim, I was finished.

I made an ungraceful belly-down lunge, caught an ankle. A bare, slim ankle I could get a grip on. Yair. A girl.

It may have showed a deplorable lack of savoir-faire for me to wrestle around with a girl in a nightgown, but my small stock of savoir-faire was at an all time low. She clawed. I butted. She kneed me. I got a body scissors on her, pinned her beneath me.

Click! The lights went on.

Across the room a small boy, about seven, in blue pajamas, held a hatchet in one hand and kept his other on the light switch.

“You let Nikky alone, you! Or I’ll kill you!”

Chapter thirty-one:

Corpses can’t testify

Misplaced humor’s a common reaction to sudden danger. Stick-up victims often get plugged for wisecracking at gunmen. Something like that must have hit me. I had to snigger at the tousle-haired kid with the tomahawk and the terrified, determined eyes.

“All you need’s a fire helmet, Chief. You got your ax with you, I see. How ’bout puttin’ out that blaze? Huh?”

“You get off Nikky.” He lifted the hatchet threateningly.

“Might have a point there, son.” I did shift my position; with bright lights on it was downright embarrassing, the way Nikky’s nightgown’d been torn. Especially since another woman, a few years older than Nikky, clomped hurriedly downstairs in dressing-gown and mules to seize the boy, gasp at the burning chair, and cry out to Nikky;

“Hold him, while I phone the police!”

Nikky said calmly, “Please don’t, Miss Ellen. Just open the door.”

Miss Ellen ran.

I let go of the tornado beneath me, made a grab for the gun. It was a pump gun. I broke it, fast, to make sure there were more shells in it.

The dogs raced into the hall.

“Call ’em off,” I stepped behind a wingback chair, “or I’ll kill ’em off.”

They bounded into the room.

“Don’t you shoot my dogs,” the boy shouted in a frenzy. “Down, Castor! Down! Pollux!”

Miss Ellen hollered, too, when she saw I was ready to use the gun. “Stop it, Pollux! Pollux!”

It was Nikky who sprang up, flung an arm around the neck of the biggest animal, flailed at the other one with her fist.

It took a couple of minutes to get them quieted enough to lie down in front of the Dutch-tiled mantel. Another five to slap out the sparks in the smoldering slipcover, exchange guarded apologies all around.

Nikky wouldn’t have shot at me except she thought I was someone else. They’d been afraid of a visit from Al Gowriss ever since Nikky’d arrived at noon.

“They” were Miss Ellen — Mrs. Ellen Marino, actually, she was Tildy’s widowed sister, Tony’s mother — Tousle Hair was Tony, of course. He was sorry he’d offered to chop my head off, but he’d thought I was hurting Nikky. Since he was the only man in the family he’d tried to protect her.

There were only the three of them in the big house. And the pinschers, of course. Tildy wasn’t home yet, though she was expected any time. The gardener and groom were down at the lodge. The cook lived at the other end of the farm.

I said I wouldn’t have entered the house if the pinschers hadn’t driven me to it. I hoped I hadn’t injured Miss Narian. No? Good. Fortunate none of her shots drilled me, though the powder grains in my face did sting.

My errand? The same as that which had taken me to Little Syria; to help a tired old waiter who’d been arrested for something he hadn’t done.

Nikky slipped out, whistled to the pinschers. They eyed me balefully as they slunk to the kitchen. There was a sound of spoon scraping a pan. She placated them for not having had a morsel of house officer.

I admired the cherry drop-leafs, the antique break-front, the white woodwork, the old-fashioned wallpaper, while Mrs. Marino chivvied Tony upstairs.

“But I don’t want to go to bed, Mamma.” The dimple in his chin deepened as he pouted. “If Aunt Tildy’s coming, I want to stay up.”

I told him, “She won’t be here until morning, son, I promise you.” Might be quite a bit later than that, I told myself.

He stamped upstairs finally, hollering questions at me every third step. “When’d Aunt Tildy leave New York?”

“Was that bad man still bothering her?”

“Had I seen the Stack O’ Jack show last night?”

Last night? It seemed more than thirty hours since that pair of hands had played We Won’t Go Home Until Morning.

Mrs. Marino brought a decanter and glasses by way of rapprochement.

“Perhaps you’d prefer a highball, Mister Vine?”

“Thanks. No. Straight across the board.” I was ready for a stimulant. “Your sister’s in a pretty desperate fix, Mrs. Marino.”

“I know. I wanted to go to New York to be with her, but she didn’t think the authorities would permit it. And now this awful news on the radio about Dow Lanerd; Tildy must be absolutely stricken.”

“Broke her up, all right.”

“Such a sweet man. So considerate. Not at all the sort you’d expect to do a frightful—”

Nikky reappeared, skirted and sweatered. She seemed annoyed with her mistress’s sister but waited respectfully while Mrs. Marino urged me to stay in one of the spare bedrooms, no trouble at all, really; they’d feel badly if I didn’t — after the peculiar reception I’d been given.

When Mrs. Marino had gone, I put it up to Nikky in words of one syllable.

“You were in the room when the guard was knifed. You saw it all.”

“No. I was in the bathroom. Washing a pair of gloves.”

“What’s the diff? Why all the guff about what the man wore?”

She rubbed her cheek, where I’d butted her. “It’s so absurd. We were doing all we could to hide it; then he had to end it himself. What’s the use?”

“Lanerd?”

“Of course.” She switched on a big console radio, tuned it in to some platter parade, low enough so we could talk but loud enough to keep anyone upstairs from hearing what we said. “After dinner, we both went into her bedroom. Mister Lanerd had a key to her room; he let himself in. They began to argue — she’d written him a note calling off plans to go to South America with him, and he began to maul her. I can’t stand anyone being mean to my baby, so we had a tussle. He swore at me, slapped me. Tildy ran into the other room to ask the guard to help with him.”

“Neither Lanerd nor Roffis will dispute any of it.”

“Tildy will tell you it’s true. Roffis came in; he tried to put Mr. Lanerd out, even had the hall door open. He struck Mister Lanerd in the face; it made him furious. He seized a knife from the serving-table the waiter’d just put out in the hall, stabbed the guard in the back. We couldn’t believe he was dead for a little, then we dragged him to the closet, dumped him in there, and held a council to decide what to do.”

I really was impressed. What she’d said checked perfectly with Auguste’s story, so far.

“We decided Mr. Lanerd would have to get cleaned up; there was blood on his coat and shirt. Right after the stabbing, we thought the waiter would be able to see us dragging the body to the closet, so I ran over and pushed the bedroom door to. There was blood on my gloves, I still had them on, some of it got on the door. That’s what made us think of the stain on Mr. Lanerd’s coat. So he went across the hall to change.”

“Auguste said someone came out of the bedroom. But he didn’t recognize the man. He recognized Lanerd quickly enough a little later when I was in the room.”

“That old goof. He’s half blind. He couldn’t recognize his own mother unless he heard her talking. Mr. Lanerd bumped right into him, but didn’t say a word. Auguste grunted but never knew who it was. Tildy telephoned the other man, Hacklin, told him that Roffis had run some intruder out of the room and hadn’t come back, would he come over and take us to the studio. So he did. Of course I had to go down in the service elevator.”

“Ridiculous rule.” I quoted, “‘Only nurses with infants allowed in guest elevators.’ Yair. Go on.”

“That’s all. Except at the studio, Tildy kept reassuring herself that she’d had to do it, she couldn’t let him go to jail.”

I remembered what MacGregory had said. It checked.

“Why’d you skip out on Hacklin?”

The music faded. There was a station break. A signature. Five minutes of the latest news from the wire room of WLEX.

She said, “Tildy was afraid we’d say the wrong thing, or do something to give Mr. Lanerd away. So I took her to my uncle’s until we found out how the wind was blowing.”

It checked with Auguste, with the producer. But not with Dow Lanerd’s waiting in 21MM with his automatic ready for business. Why was that?

“Oh, we’d all been under such a strain, expecting that cochon Gowriss to sneak in and murder us both in our beds. We pulled the bureau up against the bedroom door every time we snatched a ten-minute nap. Mr. Lanerd was as scared of Gowriss as we were. He thought, several times, he’d been followed by a man in a taxi—” she paused to listen.

The zombi voice from the console said:

“... after a hair-raising chase for seven miles through crowded traffic on the Boston Post Road at speeds in excess of eighty miles an hour, Connecticut State Police tonight shot it out with Albert Gowriss, notorious criminal. Gowriss and a woman companion were critically wounded by gunfire and subsequent smashup...”

“One thing about you, Miss Narian. There are fewer and fewer people who can contradict your story.”

Chapter thirty-two:

Amnesia?

In the Plaza Royale, we’ve one old girl who’s been living in a tower suite for nine years. She hasn’t been out of the hotel more’n a dozen times annually. Says she considers our metropolitan palacio the positive peak of luxury living. Point is, she can afford to live anywhere she wants to — and the place she left to come to New York was Fayette County, Kentucky! Man!

If I could afford one of those Bluegrass country homes, I’d never envy anyone who lived in New York. Not to mention Carmel, Cal., the Isle of Capri, anywhere you like on the Riviera. Or what have you.

When I woke up in Lovelawn’s west guest room next morning, my vista was a golden green sea of rippling corn, an emerald knoll where jet-black cattle browsed, a bronze mare and her nuzzling colt silhouetted against the sun on the crest. Prettier than Central Park. Much.

There was more to it than My Old Kentucky Home atmosphere, too. A shaving-kit the Syrian had set out in my private shower room. Tasty old ham with eggs goldenrod, corn cakes and country butter, clotted cream and coffee our breakfast chef should have taken a cue from — served in solitary splendor off Limoges china, by a Negress who had as much aplomb as any of our Gallic waiters.

I couldn’t understand how Tildy Millett would have been willing to give up all that. She’d have had to, of course; Dow Lanerd wouldn’t have been the type to move into any wife’s home.

The females of the household had petit déjeuner upstairs. The youngster’d been up for hours, was ky-hootin’ around the yard on a palomino pony, buckarooing all over the place.

I had seconds on old ham, made a note to ask Emile why we couldn’t get flavor like that on our menu, went over Nikky’s story, step by step.

It dovetailed neatly with the official version. Maybe too neatly. I’d stayed up half the night with her, trying to discover discrepancies. She’d had answers for everything.

Why’d she described the murderer’s suit as dark instead of cream-colored? To divert suspicion from “her baby’s” fiancé.

What reason could Tildy have had for claiming the man who killed Roffis looked like Roy Yaker, an acquaintance of Lanerd’s? Must have been because Yaker was the first person who’d come to Tildy’s mind, when I’d insisted on some description. The pollster’d been loitering around 21CC and the corridor with what Nikky diagnosed as lecherous intent. Once he’d been in the elevator with Tildy and managed to let his hand come into contact with her — Nikky illustrated with scornful distaste — her behind! Tildy’d ignored him. But she’d have remembered him, unkindly.

Nikky got peeved at my persistence.

She did add a few details. Which dropped into place snugly, too. For one, Tildy’d left Lanerd’s table at the Blue Blazer to phone Nikky, who was with her cousin Golub in Brooklyn. That’s why Nikky hadn’t been near her mistress at the time Gowriss shot the Grocer-boy. For another, Nikky was convinced Gowriss, or someone working for him, had tracked her down at the Narian house, sometime Sunday, in the belief Tildy’d confided in her maid even if she hadn’t told the D.A.’s men about Gowriss.

That would have been important, if true. It could have accounted for the blitz on Atlantic Avenue. But in that event, why did Tildy claim the guy who’d shattered my windshield had been the one who’d stabbed Roffis? The gent who could have been Yaker’s twin? I didn’t ask Nikky that.

I did ask her to plane to Manhattan with me in the morning. She refused. I had to bear down.

I told her Tildy was in the greatest possible danger; wasn’t going to be able to get to the Bluegrass right away; would need her friend and companion as never before. That didn’t work.

So I hollered cop. If she wasn’t going to come back to New York willingly to testify, I’d have no recourse except to have her held for extradition. Of course I couldn’t have done it. But she didn’t know that. She agreed sullenly.

Whether she thought she’d put over her yarn about Lanerd, or suspected I’d uncovered the truth, I couldn’t tell. She was a cool one. The Prosecutor’d have little luck trying to fluster her, if he got her on the stand.

While I finished that sumptuous breakfast, I wondered what she would admit, when it came right down to the courtroom.

I wandered out to the porch with the torn screen door. Castor and Pollux were agreeably noticeable by their absence.

“Whoopee-ti-yo,” I called as Tony hightailed ’round the corner. “Practicing to give Roy Rogers a run for his box office?”

“Uh, uh.” He brought the pony to a prancing stop. “I wouldn’t give a candy bar to be th’ best doggone cowboy there is. I wanna be a champion skater like Aunt Tildy. Ever see her do the sword dance? On ice?”

“She’s great.”

“Bet she is! She can do stunts Ev Chandler and Idi Papez can’t — an’ they’re tops, not countin’ Aunt Tildy.” He dismounted. “’Course in the summer I can’t practice, an’ Mamma says it takes an awful lot of practice. But Aunt Tildy’s goin’ to take me to New York when I pass my class-one test. I can do a Mohawk and a rocker pretty good, already.”

“That’ll be swell. You come stop at the hotel, when you get there.” That, I thought, was one invitation that might not be taken up for some time.

Nikky came out on the porch. She carried a small, cloth-covered suitcase.

Tony wailed, “You aren’t goin’ away again, Nikky!”

“I have to, Tony. I don’t want to. But I have to go back with this gentleman.” Her resentment hadn’t decreased a bit.

“You bring Aunt Tildy back with you, huh?” He could tell there was something disturbing going on.

“I hope so.” She ruffled his hair. “I hope I can bring her back. I’ll tell her how well you’re getting along with your riding. Let me see you gallop.”

He mounted, went pounding down the lane of oaks. Mrs. Marino came out. We got in her car, passed Tony almost at the gate. I waved good-by.

Nothing but polite chitchat on the way to the airport. Even winging north to Cincinnati, Nikky wasn’t inclined to conversation.

What did she know about “Seven for a secret”? She gave me an inscrutable Syrian stare. I even started her off with “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” She remained a sphinx.

When we’d changed planes, were kiting along at ten thousand over the Alleghenys, I did get one scrap of information. I wanted to know who might have been hunting her through Little Syria down on Washington Street.

She didn’t know. Couldn’t conjecture.

After she thought about it awhile, she said, “That Scotsman in the advertising agency. Jeff MacGregory. He was asking me, week or so ago, if I’d ever eaten in the Syrian restaurants. I told him once in a while I went there to get some shish kibbab or mehche with rice. He said perhaps he would see me there sometime.”

That was all. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t comment. She went to sleep, or pretended to. I tried not to think of all the various kinds of trouble I could be in when we got to Manhattan.

There are always a brace of plain-clothes men on eagle-eye duty at the LaGuardia ramps; I thought we might be picked up on orders from Hacklin, as we came in. But nobody paid any attention to us. I was content not to have any loud huzzahs or dancing in the streets.

It was half past one when we climbed into a cab and headed for the city, nearly two when I left Nikky in the taxi with the meter clicking, while I descended to the broiling basement of the Finnish Baths.

Pud registered tremendous relief. “Am I glad you come back! I been havin’ one hell of a time with that tizzy you dump in my lap.”

“You have to tie him down with wet sheets?”

“Nah. No violence, whatsoever. It’s only this here is a healtherie,” Pud said, “not a nut house.”

I braced myself. “Cutting out paper dolls? Or what?”

“Nothin’ like that. He’s no trouble, akshally. But he’s blacked out. He can’t remember a thing. His name. His home. How he got here. Where he come by that shiner. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“That’s great,” I said. “All we need is a nice case of amnesia. That’ll goof it up good!”

If it was on the level, my case was out the window in a high wind.

Chapter thirty-three:

Accusation

There is such a thing as amnesia. It’s not invariably a convenient lapse dreamed up by some guy who can’t think of any other way to explain a three-day absence from home and hearth. Almost always, in those cooked-up instances, there’s a sudden, complete recovery. Maybe it’d be that way with Yaker.

I told Pud to show the pollster how to use a zipper, case he’d forgotten. While Yaker was dressing, I tried Mr. Bell’s system. Ruth Moore wasn’t at her apartment. Mrs. Lanerd wasn’t at home. Jeff MacGregory, so some bright babe at Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright informed me, was downtown in the Criminal Courts building. With the Grand Jury.

If the producer was there, the others would probably be testifying, too, I thought. When Pud came back presently with Crew Cut fully arrayed in all Walch’s glory, I said, “Le’s go play charades with Mister D.A. Right with you?”

Yaker stared blankly. Of Pud he asked, “Who’s this?”

Pud grunted, “Gil Vine, bud. He brought you here. You hadda fight somewhere. You were stinko. Remember?”

Yaker waggled his head dazedly. “No. I wish I could. Why does he want me to go with him?”

I paid Pud off, took Yaker’s arm. “Maybe it’ll come back to you, when you get down there.”

Pud came up to the sidewalk with us. “If he’s in that kind of trouble, I don’t want anybody to say I’ve been hiding him out here.”

“You’re in the clear, Pud. I’ll take the blame.” I pushed Yaker in the cab ahead of me. I sat between him and the Syrian. We got rolling.

Nikky had a queer expression as she watched Yaker. He gazed at her with the same puzzled air he’d used on me.

I asked him a couple of questions about Edie and Ruth Moore, elicited nothing except: “I don’t remember those people — do I know them?” I said he’d had dealings with them, let it go at that.

There are several waiting-rooms outside the grand jury chamber where the DAides present their evidence to the twenty-three good men and true. A cop on the third floor wanted to know who I was looking for. “Mister Hacklin — the Lanerd business.”

“Oh. Yuh. Room three-one-four.”

It could have been the anteroom outside a dentist’s office, minus the old magazines. A dozen hard, straight-backed chairs, half a dozen people, and Charley Schneider. Jeff MacGregory was next to Marge, Keith Walch sat beside Tildy, in the chair pulled close beside Ruth Moore’s was Dr. Elm. Their heads swiveled around like spectators at a tennis match, when I shepherded my two witnesses in.

The only person who didn’t come up on his feet was the physician with the pointed beard. Nikky flew to Tildy. Walch growled, “It’s about time,” at Yaker; Ruth shrank as far away from Yaker as she could.

Schneider roared, “Siddown. All of y’, siddown.” He swaggered to me with that familiar belligerence. “Comin’ in of y’r own accord ain’t goin’ t’do you a mite of good, Smart Stuff. We got a list of charges against you, would choke a whale.”

“I’ll cherish ’em to remind me of you.” I boosted Yaker at him. “Meantime, charge this lad. He’s the one you want.”

“Yeah?” Schneider squinted at Yaker. “Who’re you?”

Yaker shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

“What?” Schneider bellowed so loudly the cop on duty in the Grand Jury room opened the door, saw there was no unseemly violence, and withdrew.

Yaker repeated. “I don’t know who I am.” His eyes roved from Marge to MacGregory, Tildy to Walch, came to rest on Ruth as if some vague stirring of recollection was beginning to assert itself. “I can’t seem to remember anything—”

Schneider’s face got hamburg-red. He stuck out his jaw at me. “Whatsa big gag, Smart Stuff?”

“I’ll tell you.” I patted Yaker’s shoulder. “You’ve been bulling ahead on the assumption Lanerd knifed Roffis and then killed himself to avoid disgrace. He didn’t. The killer was a gent who knew Lanerd, knew of his interest in Miss Millett, had his own reasons for wanting to break it up.”

Yaker listened as if I’d been giving a recipe for spaghetti sauce.

“He was in a room on the floor below Lanerd’s suite; he’d been up on the twenty-first to familiarize himself with the layout of the rooms. He made careful preparations for what he meant to do. Covered his finger tips with melted wax from a candle; the floor maid found the bedspread spattered with it.”

They were all standing again and, probably unconsciously, backing away from Yaker a little. He wet his lips.

“It’s all Greek to me — what he’s saying. I can’t remember—”

I kept pouring. “Mister Lanerd’s secretary had been in his suite around five-thirty. She stepped out in the hall to listen to a squabble in Miss Millett’s suite; that’s when the murderer slipped into Lanerd’s rooms unnoticed. He hid there awhile, expecting Lanerd to come in. But the adman didn’t show up.”

Yaker squeezed his forehead as if to force his memory to behave.

“Miss Moore came back into Lanerd’s living-room. From some phone conversation she had then, the murderer must’ve discovered Lanerd was going directly to Miss Millett’s, instead of coming to his own rooms. So the murderer decided to get in her suite, force her to conceal him until Lanerd’s arrival. He knew Lanerd was often admitted to Miss Millett’s bedroom after tapping a pre-arranged signal on her door. He’d heard the signal, could reproduce it. But he was afraid that, after opening the door, she’d slam it in his face before he could push in, unless he could somehow convince her it was Lanerd seeking admission. So he changed his coat for a jacket he found in Lanerd’s closet.”

Ruth goggled at Yaker, as if her eyes were about to pop right out of their sockets. I hurried on before Schneider gave way to his inclination to shut me up.

“He slipped into Lanerd’s coat, went to the corridor, rat-tatted the signal on Miss Millett’s door. Her maid pulled aside the bureau they’d shoved against the door as a protection from gunboy Gowriss. When the door opened a little, the murderer let them see the sleeve and shoulder of Lanerd’s jacket, so they hauled the bureau completely away, let him in.”

Tildy and Nikky fixed their eyes on me in utter consternation.

“When Miss Millett saw who it was, of course, she was horrified — particularly since the murderer’d snatched a steak knife off one of the serving-tables in the hall. She ran into the living-room to call Roffis. Probably the maid grappled with the intruder. Right, Miss Narian?”

The maid rattled off something in Arabic to Tildy. I couldn’t understand it. But I could tell it wasn’t a testimony to my sweet disposition.

“Maybe Miss Narian ran into the living-room, too. Anyhow, Roffis dashed in, was stabbed as he came through the door to the bedroom. Likely the murderer thought he was knifing Lanerd. When he found it was only the guard he’d killed, he slammed the connecting door shut, that’s how blood-prints got on the bedroom door, rifled the guard’s pockets. Took his room key which also unlocked the closets, dragged the body to the closet, threw it in. Went out through the same door by which he’d come in, bumping into Auguste as he did and getting blood on Auguste’s sleeve.

Yaker groaned, “No! No, no!” Then he caught himself. “I don’t remember a thing — but I know I could never have done anything like that!”

I tried to sneer. It’s not my forte, but I did my best. “One door to the Lanerd suite would have been left unlocked, of course, so it was no trouble to get back in there after Auguste had returned to the Millett living-room for the last of the serving-tables. The steak knife went in towel hamper, the blood was scrubbed off guilty hands, the jacket exchanged for the killer’s own coat. Then it was merely a matter of waiting, probably right there in the bathroom, for Dow Lanerd to return to his own suite — take his gun from him, kill him with it, make it look like—”

“Frame-up!” Yaker shouted. “You’re all—”

Schneider commanded, “Shaddup, all ’f yuh!”

“Ask Miss Millett.” I held out a hand to her for confirmation. “She described the man who killed Herb Roffis. Big, tall, husky, florid face—”

“By God!” Yaker howled, “I see it all now! You’re all in it together to get me. I won’t stand—”

Schneider grabbed his elbows from behind, pinned him.

“The clincher,” I had to raise my voice over the scuffling, “was when he gave a key to a kind of glorified madam, so she could send a couple of her hot-pant cuties up to his room. He gave her the wrong key by mistake. The key to 21MM!”

“Not me!” Yaker shrieked. “I did not. I never even saw the woman. It was Keith!”

I said, “It took long enough for you to admit it.”

Keith Walch didn’t say anything, except with a stubby-nosed, nickel-plated 38.

It spoke louder than words.

Chapter thirty-four:

Cornered killer

It happened faster than “Hands Up!”

He stalked for the door. I was in his way. So were Schneider and Yaker. But I was nearest. I grabbed a straight-back chair, swung it legs-first.

He angled the snout of the gun at my eyes. I jabbed the chair at him. Chair’s a disconcerting weapon; if you don’t believe it, ask a circus lion.

He fired. Over my head. That’s why expert man-handlers never aim as high as the eyes. The lift of the barrel in the recoil always throws a shot high.

The chair’s upper leg caught him in the wishbone. It’s opposite, where you’d expect. He made a keening sound; half squeal, half screech. The gun went off again as he folded.

For a minute, we had a junior-model pandemonium. One blue busting in from the Grand Jury room. Hacklin and a dozen middle-aged men crowding behind him. Another cop rushing in from the hall with drawn revolver. Schneider trying to roar himself into command of the situation. Yaker having a paroxysm of hiccups. All the females, except Tildy, making their own special sort of noises appropriate to the occasion. I got Walch’s gun and wallet, gave the gun to the Grand Jury room cop.

When the commotion had subsided and the cuffs were on Walch, Schneider returned to hectoring me. “What’s the idea, Smart Stuff? Makin’ like this dummy was the murderer?” He thumbed a thumb at a still hiccuping Yaker.

“Everything I said was on the up and up about Walch. He managed it the way I said. He did have the strongest reasons for wanting Lanerd out of the way. He’d lose his principal piece of talent; Miss Millett wouldn’t have stayed in show biz long. Probably her reason for wanting to be married was so she could have children?” I asked it indirectly.

Nikky answered tartly, “Anything wrong with that?”

“Nothing at all,” I said. “I’m in favor of it. Mentioned it to show why Walch didn’t mind her having an affair, but was willing to murder to keep her from marrying. Even that wasn’t the main motive that powered him into murder.”

Hacklin’s turn. “What was?”

I glanced at Tildy.

“No.” She seized my arm, pleading.

Marge urged me to leave her alone.

Nikky joined in. “Isn’t it terrible enough?”

I opened Walch’s wallet. “I’d say not. We have to put Walch where he can’t do any more damage.” I took out the snapshot of the kid in the polar-bear suit. “Who’s this, Miss Millett?”

She shook her head, weeping.

“Her son.” I handed the snap to Hacklin. “Saw Tony down in Kentucky. Swell youngster. Even if he does look a little like his father, there.”

Walch was doubled over in pain, didn’t retort. Tildy stopped crying.

“How’d you find out?”

“When I was over at the Icequadrille rehearsal yesterday, I happened to see this picture. So I recognized the boy soon’s I saw him down in Lexington. He resembles you more than he does your sister, too. Seemed funny Walch’d have the boy’s photograph in his wallet — and yet none of the mother, who’s his main source of income. Thought it was queer, too, that Walch hadn’t been in your suite at the hotel more. Why he hadn’t gone to the Stack O’ Jack show with you. Agent getting ten percent of your salary ought to have been around to smooth things out for you.”

MacGregory grunted, “I’d wondered about that, myself. Even in spite of Nikky’s crack about his making Tildy nervous.”

“The principal thing” — I watched Hacklin and Schneider trying to find likenesses between Tony’s picture and the man in manacles; there weren’t too many; he really resembled Tildy more than Walch — “was the emphasis on Lexington. That farewell note Miss Millett sent to Lanerd — it said she couldn’t elope with him because of ‘the way things are.’ Since she’d been doing a lot of long-distancing to Lexington, and Lanerd told Hacklin she might be on her way there, I thought probably it might be the way things were, down in Kentucky, which caused her to change her mind about eloping.”

Nikky snapped, “So you had to hound her all the way to Kentucky, even when she wasn’t there!”

“Wouldn’t have had to, if I could’ve doped out the cryptic note someone, I presumed it was the murderer, sent her right after Roffis was found dead. The note was signed ‘Lx’ or Lexington. Miss Moore thought Lanerd had sent it. Actually Walch wrote it in Lanerd’s suite after murdering the guard.”

Hacklin stuck fists on hips. “You didn’t show us any note!”

“Always respect the confidence of the guest, golden rule of the business.” I appealed to Tildy. “‘Seven for a secret’ — what was that?”

She looked away. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“No. Well. ‘Never forget four’ was the one I made a blind guess at. When Fran Lane stayed with you at the Brulard Saturday night, she heard you mumbling in your sleep, ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth.’ Sounded to me like a toast, one sup of the cup for each. Only thing I could work out was ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for da-da, four for—’ only thing anyone would be likely to want to drink to, which rhymes with mirth—”

“Birth,” said Doctor Elm softly. “It’s an Olde English Pub motto; how does it go, now?

“One for sorrow

Two for mirth

Three for a wedding

Four for a birth

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

Never to be told.”

“Four was as much as I could wrangle,” I said. “Of course, I wasn’t sure about that. But if there’d been a birth which might have stood in Lanerd’s way, question was — whose child? And — had there been a wedding and a divorce? Or neither?”

Marge went to Tildy, put her arms around her. Nikky, too, came hotly to the skater’s defense. “There was a wedding. But that pig,” she stared hatred at the doubled-up agent, “told her he’d been divorced from his first wife and he hadn’t. So Tony — well—”

“Yair. And though Walch didn’t have any legal right to the boy, he could hold illegitimacy over Miss Millett whenever he felt like it, could publicly claim fatherhood, mess things up for everybody. Might even sue to take the boy away from her. Emotional blackmail.” It wasn’t necessary to make Tildy admit she’d covered up for Walch, by accusing Yaker, and Nikky’d done the same by throwing the blame on Lanerd, because Tildy couldn’t bear to have her boy grow up to realize his father was a killer. “The blackmail slant was one of the first things I thought about, only in a different way.”

Ruth wanted to know what I meant.

“Walch was an old hand at traveling around the country. He’d have been used to stopping at good hotels. He knew the rules, what he could get away with — and couldn’t. Made me wonder, the first time I saw him with La Eberlein, why he was making a bluff at sneaking con girls into the Plaza Royale.”

Walch raised his head. “You lousy keyholer!”

I said, “You knew you couldn’t run those cuties into our hotel. Must’ve had a reason for wanting someone to think it might work, when it wouldn’t. Expect you meant to get the madam up in Lanerd’s suite just long enough to throw suspicion on her for the murder you were going to commit. She knew Gowriss’s friends down at the Blue Blazer. She hung around there all the time. It would have been easy for the D.A. to assume she’d been paid to put Lanerd out of circulation, since he’d been in the café at the time of the shooting, too. And might have seen Gowriss, himself. She was a good decoy. The more notice we took of her, the better.”

He came for me, lunging with the handcuffs.

I let Schneider take him.

Chapter thirty-five:

Keys and keys

The curvaceous statuette was on the ornamental table in the foyer of Ruth’s apartment when we went in. I stroked it gently.

“Nearly gave me amnesia, me proud beauty.”

Ruth fluffed her hair in front of the mirror. “What I can’t understand, why’d Keith Walch sneak in here yesterday? He couldn’t have known you were coming.”

“No.” I followed her into the kitchenette, helped with the ice cubes. “Matter of keys. Keys were the crux of it.”

“Probably make something of that if you worked at it. Crux — who stole keys.”

“I’ll take it up, next board meeting.” I told her how I figured it. “Keep in mind that Lanerd knew it was Walch who busted into the Millett suite wearing Dow’s jacket. Tildy’d have told him; they’d have talked about Walch plenty before then; her reference to calling off the elopement because of ‘the way things stood’ showed that. Whether, before she left for the studio with Hacklin, she knew or guessed that Roffis had been killed and heaved in her closet, that’s beside the point. Point is, Lanerd knew Walch was after him. That’s why he had his gun at ready when I came in the suite.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted to shoot Walch, if he knew about the boy.”

“Maybe not. Hard to say. Walch having caused Tildy so much grief. But Lanerd didn’t want to get killed. He left Tildy’s suite about five minutes before you came across the hall from his rooms. Hacklin told him to hop over to the studio to chase Tildy. Instead, he went down to the lobby, phoned MacGregory. He learned she hadn’t returned, so he phoned Nikky, found Tildy was there. She must have convinced him it wasn’t wise to let Hacklin know where she was. So he rang Hacklin upstairs, reported she was on her way home to Lexington.”

“Where do the keys come in?”

“They’re coming. Right about then you were scooting out of 21MM across to Lanerd’s suite. In a minute I followed. We talked until Yaker showed up and I got that screwy call from the sizzle sister down in the Steeplechase.” Ruth had the normal curiosity of a nice girl about how Edie and her sex-tettes operated; I sketched it out, well’s I could.

“I can’t believe Dow would be interested in that sort of — cheapie.”

“Doubt if he was. But Yaker was. Lanerd wouldn’t have objected to having the head of a group which, among other things, was responsible for rating radio programs, under obligation to him. I hustled down to the cocktail bar, soon’s I left you. Walch was there. Edie had a key in her bag. One I suppose Walch had just handed her, in the belief he was passing over the key to Yaker’s room. He’d gotten that from Crew Cut earlier in the evening, on the pretext of sneaking the con girls up there, used the room to borrow stationery, wrote a note to Tildy, poured melted wax on his finger tips.”

She curled up on the divan. I dittoed beside her.

“When Walch saw that 21MM key on the floor where I’d sort of accidentally bounced it, he knew he’d made a bad error. That was the key he’d taken from Roffis. He’d meant to leave it in Lanerd’s fancy cream-colored jacket. He still had the 21CC key with him because he’d need it to get back in Lanerd’s rooms. It must have dawned on him that the key he’d actually stuck in the chocolate-checked coat was the one to Yaker’s room. It wouldn’t do to have anybody find that, start wondering how it got there.”

“The tangled web.”

“Yair. So Walch drinks and thinks a while, decides to go up to Lanerd’s suite, get Yaker’s key. About that time you were straightening up in 21CC, getting ready to leave. This next part is pure conjecture, but until we get a complete confession from Walch, it’ll have to do. I think Lanerd, coming out of his lobby phone booth, saw Walch heading for the elevators. He waited one or two cars, followed. You probably passed him, coming down as he was going up.”

She winced.

“Lanerd would have gone in his rooms with his gun ready for business. Walch was probably just inside the door. He got the gun away from Lanerd, forced him in the bathroom, shot him. I’ll gamble Hacklin never searched to see if a second slug had been fired, say, behind the lavatory bowl. After Lanerd was dead, Walch must have put the gun in his hand, pulled the trigger again, so there’d be something for the homicide boys to lean on when they claimed suicide.”

“I guess it doesn’t make any difference now, but I’m glad to know for sure he didn’t kill himself.”

“Well. Walch went to get Yaker’s key from the chocolate-cream jacket. Maybe you’d moved things around in the closet where he’d hung the coat?”

“Yes. I went through everything to see there weren’t any — incriminating items around. I shifted hangers, too.”

“That was it. He got worried for fear you’d found that 2010 key. If you had, you’d be suspicious soon’s you learned Lanerd was dead. So, after Walch chased me around Queens and Brooklyn in a taxicab—”

“He did?”

“Sure he did. Afraid I’d put pressure on Edie and dope out the significance of the key switch. I expect he simply waited for me to leave the hotel and followed me to Manhasset looking for a chance to add me to his score of two down. He beat me down to Little Syria, hunting a lead to Nikky. I heard he didn’t get anywhere with that inquiry. But he must have, because he was waiting for me when I left Narian’s with Tildy. His cab lost an argument with a fire hydrant, but he came close to putting a Vine obituary in the paper. Of course Tildy recognized him then, but she couldn’t tell me without sacrificing everything she’d been trying to save, down in Kentucky.”

“Down in the Grand Jury room, I heard him complaining to Tildy about having had to spend all Saturday night and Sunday morning bailing some friend of Lanerd’s out of trouble.”

“Advertising his alibi. He did go to the police station to help Yaker after the big boob got suckered in by a pair of Edie’s slick chicks. But not until after he’d returned from Brooklyn and come up here to waylay you, in case you’d had ideas about that 2010 key in Lanerd’s jacket. When I came in he was hiding behind the door; after he’d bopped me, he was afraid to hang around, case one of your neighbors heard the fracas. So he beat it back to his club, where he found an urgent squeal for help from Yaker at the precinct house. Yaker was a faker — about that amnesia — because he didn’t dare break down Walch’s alibi, scared of being disgraced back home, on the rape charge. That’s why I had to hammer at Yaker there in the Jury anteroom — if he’d stuck to that blank-memory gag, it might not have been easy to break Walch’s alibi.”

“To think I left the door open for Keith Walch to stroll calmly into my apartment!”

“Only time he didn’t have to fidoodle with a key. All he did was drop that empty envelope on the floor; idea was, you’d stoop over to pick it up — and voom! Only — I did, instead.”

“And he always appeared to be such a harmless, funny-faced little man.”

“He wouldn’t have been harmless to Tildy on the yacht, if he’d known I’d found out about Tony. He might well have erased her from his slate; I was concerned about that.”

“About that waiter too, weren’t you?”

“Auguste. Yes. I was. I like Auguste. I know a lot of people who have the idea all waiters are merely a low form of holdup men, wearing dirty dickies, delighting in the customer’s discomfort. But most Plaza Royale waiters are pretty decent people, better some days than others; just trying to get by—”

The phone rang. She answered. It was Tim. “Skipper? When you comin’ back here?”

“When I can afford one of those dandy duplexes, Timothy. First I must find me a job and some spending money.”

“Ah, Chief! Stop that guff! You been reinstated, with no loss of seniority nor nothin’! You want ’em to roll out the red carpet for you?”

“ Is this hearsay? Or official?”

“Reidy says to tell you to fan your pants down here before he goes completely nuts answerin’ questions about when are you comin’ back. He says if you will show in time for dinner, he will let you pick your own year for the champagne.”

“A tempting offer, Timmie. Extend my regrets. Suggest he save the sirloin of fatted calf. The prodigal has a prior invitation.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Or has that been withdrawn?”

Ruth was surprised. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about!” But there was that luminous light in her eyes, a shy, sly smile on her lips.

“Tim,” I said, “’tis th’ morn of th’ morrow I’ll be seein’ you.”