Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (13 page)

The shock of his wife’s tragic fate had completed the havoc already wrought by liquor upon his none too stable temperament.

“Poor devil,” muttered Stephen Lansing just before we all went in to dinner that night, “he’s in a bad way. Mind temporarily a blank.”

I sighed. “It’s just as well. He’ll have a long time in which to remember.”

“At least,” said Howard, “the police have eliminated him from the list of suspects, if he was ever really on.”

“Yes,” said Stephen, “Mosby’s the only person in the house who has an alibi for the last murder.”

Howard nodded. “He never stirred out of that chair in the parlour till after she struck, poor fellow.”

I shivered again. I did not have to close my eyes to see that slight form hurtling downward onto the sloping narrow roof over the employees’ entrance and then sliding limply off to the paved court below it.

“It seems to me,” murmured Howard, glancing sharply at Stephen Lansing, “that in this instance the murderer has overshot his hand. I mean, after all, it ought to be possible for the police to locate the window from which she-er-fell. There should be marks on the sill, wouldn’t you think?”

Stephen frowned. “The police haven’t taken me into their confidence,” he said brusquely. “If you are out pumping for information, Warren, why don’t you ask the inspector himself if he’s located the room from which the girl was thrown?”

“Damn you, are you suggesting that I – that I ...” began Howard heatedly.

I made a testy gesture. “Tut, tut,” I said, “all this is trying enough without our flying at each other at every opportunity like bantam roosters. You are unnecessarily thin skinned lately, Howard, and as for you, Mr Lansing, I consider Howard’s question a perfectly natural one. I myself would give something to know if the police have any clue as to where Lottie Mosby met her doom.”

“I don’t doubt you’d like to know, Adelaide,” said Stephen disagreeably.

“I don’t in the least doubt it.”

It was my turn to flare up. “Are you insinuating that I – that I...”

Howard laughed. “Now who’s flying off the handle?”

Somewhat sheepishly I subsided, and Stephen gave us both a sardonic grin. “From now on, unless I’m greatly mistaken,” he said grimly, “it’s going to be every man for himself in this investigation and the devil take the hindmost.”

I did not doubt it. One had only to glance around at the various tables in the dining room that night to feel the hostility which was rising to fever heat among us. Only a short while before we had been a normal group of civilized human beings, the majority of us rather better bred than the average, I should say, but under the threat of violence and personal danger we were fast reverting to the primitive, where self-preservation is the first law of the pack.

Nobody that night was disposed to meet anybody else’s gaze frankly, and back of the furtive glances which we did exchange lurked suspicion and other vicious thoughts, their ugly heads reared in our eyes like serpents. It was painfully apparent from that moment on that not one of us trusted the other. Speech was guarded, unless betrayed by anger into virulent attack. If possible, people did not say what they were thinking. After all, two in that house had already paid with their lives for knowing more than it was safe to know. Yet if anybody did forget himself sufficiently to bring his ideas out into the open, he invariably went too far, as temper generally does.

I myself was no exception. Already worried and upset, it irritated me to the boiling point to find a new waitress installed at my table, a floozy young woman with hennaed hair and prominent hips which she had a habit of flaunting as she walked. She was not inexperienced – in fact, she seemed to know her business thoroughly; nevertheless, she was the grievance which broke the camels back so far as I was concerned.

I crooked my finger imperiously at Cyril Fancher, and when he approached, with obvious reluctance, I regarded him in a jaundiced manner over my spectacles and remarked in my most caustic style, “Of course, I am merely a guest, just one of those who pay the bills, and I realise a guest in this house is regarded by the management as a necessary evil with absolutely no rights in how the place should be run; nevertheless might I be so bold as to inquire what you have done with the girl Annie?”

To my utter astonishment Cyril Fancher turned white, as white as if I had accused him of murder or worse. “What do you mean?” he demanded in a quaking falsetto. “How dare you intimate that I have-have...”

I suppose he saw by my expression that he was behaving more than customarily like a fool, for he paused abruptly, bit his lip, and attempted one of his inane jokes, though his voice was still not quite steady.

“You surely don’t hold me personally responsible, Miss Adams,” he murmured, trying to look both arch and ingratiating at the same time, “for these little fly-by-nights who flit from job to job like Eliza – wasn’t it? – skipping over the ice floes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“You should know by now, Cyril Fancher,” I said sharply, “that no well brought-up Southern woman ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin or allowed that obnoxious book to be mentioned in her presence.”

“Yes,” he said, “I did know, only I forgot. Please accept my apology.”

He gave me an obsequious glance.

“I suppose no offence can be taken where none was intended,” I conceded grudgingly.

“Thanks,” he said and started to move away, an expression of relief upon his face.

I frowned. “You still haven’t told me what happened to Annie,” I called after him sharply.

He looked back over his shoulder with a grimace.

“Nothing has happened to her so far as I know,” he snapped.

“She simply informed me at noon today that she had found a better place and wouldn’t be back.”

“I hope she’s right,” I sighed. “So often these young girls seem to go from here to worse.”

Again he stared at me with a startled face.

“What do you mean?” he stammered.

“What could I mean,” I demanded impatiently, “except that waitresses appear to me to have a genius for popping off the griddle into the blaze?”

“Yes?”

I knit my brows. “There was that Gwendolyn,” I said. “Didn’t she get run over by a truck after she left here, trying to hitchhike her way to Hollywood?”

“I believe I saw something to that effect in the paper,” he admitted in his noncommittal way.

I shook my head. “She was a silly chit,” I said, “but you’d think even a Dumb Dora would know that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points or at least that southeast on the New Orleans highway is no short cut to Hollywood.”

He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I suppose if they had any intelligence to speak of, they wouldn’t be hopping tables,” he said.

“I suppose not,” I agreed pensively.

This time he succeeded in making his escape, disappearing kitchen ward with a haste which gave me a feeling of acute satisfaction.

I did not like Cyril Fancher and I may as well acknowledge that it always afforded me pleasure to give him an uncomfortable moment. There was no one, in fact, upon whom I would rather have vented my spleen, and our little tilt had done a great deal toward clearing up my disposition. It enabled me to inquire the name of my new waitress with less acidity than might otherwise have been the case.

“Gloria, madam, Gloria Larue,” she informed me blandly.

Nee Lizzie Brown or Jones, I thought to myself, eyeing her blunt nose and rouged mouth and the large knuckles of her reddened but capable hands.

“I see you also take after the movies,” I remarked dryly.

She looked me over for a moment and then nodded vigorously.

“Ya-uss. All us girls do. Don’t you?” she said with an enthusiastic smile.

I coughed. “Well, not exactly,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I loathe them.”

From that time on Miss Gloria Larue made no attempt to engage me in conversation although she was scrupulously careful about attending to my wants. I think she would have cut up my meat and spoon-fed me had I allowed her. I seemed to have been pigeonholed in her category as a mental deficient, a sad case though harmless.

Glancing about the dining room that night I did not feel any too complacent myself about the workings of my head piece, which I had been in the habit of regarding as an excellent bit of machinery.

It seemed to me that being in the very centre of things I should have had in my hands all the necessary threads to the intricate and sinister tangle in which we found ourselves involved at the Richelieu Hotel. If so, I was compelled to admit that I was too stupid to recognize them.

A number of curious things occurred to me as I studied my neighbours at the other tables. I was aware of queer undercurrents, of inexplicable divergences from the normal in the conduct of certain people, of puzzling incidents which I had seen or shared, but what it all meant I was at a loss to say. Nor could I find answers to the questions buzzing in my ears like a horde of mosquitoes.

“We can’t all be guilty of murder,” I thought irritably, striving to ignore the reason or reasons which I had for suspecting practically every person upon whom my eyes rested.

Polly Lawson and her aunt made a brave pretence at eating while carrying on a hectic conversation, although it was patent their thoughts were elsewhere. I frowned. Why had Polly run away with the blood stained knife? Why had that particular knife been used in the first place to slit a man’s throat? Had the knife really been stolen from Mary’s room the afternoon before the murder? And in that case why had Mary, when confronted by the police, failed to say so, after Polly fairly put the words into her mouth? I frowned again.

Over at the next table Howard Warren was scowling at his plate, carefully avoiding so much as a glance in Polly’s direction and feverishly lighting one cigarette from the butt of another. It was unlike Howard to smoke or carry any other habit to excess. It had always seemed to me Howard was, if anything, a little too exemplary.

I remember saying once that he would be more human if his foot could slip once. There was no doubt that in the past two days Howard had changed. He was by no means the model of irreproachable propriety he had been.

I sighed. Why had Howard broken all precedents and invited me to a picture show the night before? Why had he insisted, to the point of rudeness, that I did not need a coat? What possible motive could he have had for wanting me out of the hotel? For trying to keep me from going to my room? And what was Howard doing on the fourth floor that night during the half-hour when James Reid was murdered? “Keep this up, Adelaide,” I advised myself sternly, “and you’ll end in a private sanatorium with the rest of the imbeciles.”

Hilda Anthony stopped Stephen Lansing on his way out of the Coffee Shop, detaining him at her table until she finished her after dinner coffee, smiling up at him through her absurd eyelashes like an odalisque, providing an odalisque is, as I have always believed, an oriental female without a vestige of shame. As usual, the Anthony woman had nothing to conceal. At least, her voice carried to every part of the room.

“Is it true, Mr Lansing,” she inquired, “that the police are absolutely unable to account for where the Mosby woman went when she ran out of the parlour?”

Stephen shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know how the impression has got around that the police use me for a confessional.”

She laughed. “Isn’t there such a thing as gratitude? You saved Inspector Bunyan a nasty blunder. He’ll have to admit that – or does he?”

“On the contrary,” said Stephen with a grimace, “the inspector admits nothing. He does not deny that I precipitated matters. Only it was barely a question of minutes before the police would have made the same discovery for themselves, says he.”

“Oh yes?” she scoffed.

Stephen grinned ruefully. “The inspector hasn’t even given me a good mark for my bright powers of observation. I am still, right along with some other people, high up on the black list of potential murderers.”

She looked puzzled. “Surely the murderer is the last person in the world who would have called the police’s attention to his crime. I mean, he of all people wanted it to look like suicide. Or should I say her crime?” she corrected herself with a taunting light in her yellow eyes.

Stephen grinned. “Far be it from me to slight the fair sex, even when it comes to manslaughter.”

“No,” she said, “you wouldn’t.”

His face sobered. “Many a woman has been driven to murder and worse.”

It seemed to me his glance flickered involuntarily to where the Adairs sat directly behind me, and, looking into the mirror, I saw that, while Kathleen did not raise her eyes from her fixed scrutiny of a salad fork by her plate, her cheeks had paled.

Hilda Anthony was still studying Stephen Lansing with a slightly baffled expression. “You haven’t yet explained why the inspector has refused to scratch you off the list of suspects,” she reminded him.

Stephen’s lips curled. “The inspector was good enough to point out that, since the police were bound to stumble upon the truth eventually, it would be a very clever stunt on the part of the murderer to distract attention from himself by exposing the alleged suicide as another successful murder. To throw the inspector off the track, or words to that effect.”

“That dressed-up little dude was never on the track,” declared Hilda Anthony scornfully, “and, what’s more, he never will be.”

“Don’t take any bets on that,” said Stephen Lansing.

“Don’t worry. I never bet on anything,” she snapped, rising to her feet. “I leave that kind of sport to the well-known suckers. Any time I let a dollar get away from me the eagle screams.”

They went on out together, followed by Howard’s contemptuous gaze. I noticed that Polly bit her lip and scowled as they went up in the elevator together, but Kathleen’s eyes were still fixed on her salad fork, although there was a white line about her mouth.

“Water will find its level,” I thought to myself with vexed disdain and wondered why it should matter to me if Stephen Lansing was flinging himself upon the talons of a vampire.

I had never pretended to like his style and as between him and Hilda Anthony I imagined it would be difficult to choose the more skilful at that particular game. Nevertheless, I was unreasonably disappointed and I have never been the kind to delude myself.