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.