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I’ve seen the law of averages repealed too often to put much faith in it.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.”