Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (19 page)

I come now to the third and last day in our reign of terror, a day which was to be written in letters of blood on the consciousness of all of us, a day which left a streak like a white ribbon in the thick black hair above Stephen Lansing’s left temple, a day from which I emerged with a permanent tic in the muscles of my right eye.

We were a sober and lugubrious group that morning after Mary Lawson went to jail. Judging from the apprehensive faces, as one after the other the guests of the Richelieu straggled into the Coffee Shop for breakfast, no one felt the easier in his mind for her arrest. The tension had, if anything, increased. People said little and, where possible, kept their eyes down. You could have spread the nervousness in the atmosphere with a trowel.

The only exception was the waitress, Miss Gloria Larue. She, at least, was walking on air. She did not confide the cause for the lilt in both her eyes and her hips to me, having, as I have noted before, apparently made up her mind that my lack of enthusiasm for the talkie heroes and heroines put me beyond her personal pale.

However, I heard her burbling over to the Adairs at the table behind me.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” she explained breathlessly. “All I’ve ever asked is the opportunity to strut my stuff where it’ll do the most good.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” said little Mrs Adair. “There’s something inspiring in the thought of a beautiful girl like you being on the air. Beauty was meant for the enjoyment of the whole world.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Miss Gloria Larue complacently.

Kathleen’s voice sounded odd. “You are quite certain this – this offer is on the up-and-up?”

“Listen,” said Gloria Larue indignantly, “big broadcasting stations don’t send you notices, asking you to appear at a specified hour for an audition, unless they mean business.”

“I suppose not,” murmured Kathleen uncertainly.

“I guess they heard about me singing at the last Union Waitresses’ ball,” Gloria went on blissfully. “Everybody there said I was a riot but” – her voice trembled slightly – “I wasn’t right sure they weren’t poking fun at me. You see, I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen, and a feller sort of gets used to taking it on the chin when he’s got nobody but himself to back his play.”

“I hope it turns out splendidly for you,” said Kathleen kindly.

“When are you leaving?”

“Right after lunch today. There’s a Memphis bus at two-thirty, if I don’t decide to-to thumb my way.”

I sighed and made a mental note to leave more than my usual tip beside my plate. In fact, I was fumbling in my purse for two half-dollar pieces when I saw Cyril Fancher frowning at me through the mirror from the Adair table beside which he had pulled up with a tight look about his mouth.

“Haven’t I warned you before, Gloria,” he said, “that we do not hire waitresses to annoy the guests with their conversation?”

“But we don’t mind,” expostulated little Mrs Adair.

However, after a glance at Cyril Fancher’s forbidding countenance, Miss Gloria Larue shouldered her tray and, sniffing audibly through her short snub nose, departed kitchen ward.

“Poor child,” I muttered to myself. “I hope she gets a break for once. The underprivileged female so seldom does.”

It was, I recall, a Thursday, the day my laundress brings my week’s washing home. That is why, directly after breakfast, I ascended to my room. Carrie was waiting for me. She and Laura, the maid who was cleaning up my quarters, were talking volubly before I opened the door, but they hushed up quickly enough when I entered. I am accustomed to the secretiveness of the staff. There is nothing they do not know about the guests, but they never discuss it except among themselves which is just as well.

Pocketing her wages, Carrie shuffled out the door. Laura, having finished, was about to follow when I halted her on the threshold.

“Something seems to have-er-happened to my water pitcher, Laura,” I said. “Please get me another.”

“Yas ’m,” said Laura stolidly.

However, when she returned a few minutes later, carrying the typical hotel pitcher which she deposited with an ungentle thump on my bedside table, she muttered something about her mammy having always told her that little pitchers have big ears, “but I never knowed twellately they had feetses.”

“What’s that you’re mumbling, Laura?” I demanded sharply.

She gave me a sullen glance. “I jest said, it’s funny how one minute dey is a water pitcher, next minute dey ain’t. But I bin telling folks all year this here house is hoodooed. Reckon they’s beginning to believe me.”

My heart was thumping against my side. “Have other people in the hotel mislaid their water pitchers, Laura?”

Her underlip poked out. “Yas ’m. I clean up room, pitcher where he belong on table, next morning no pitcher. I git de guest another one. Sometime dat day old pitcher bob up, maybe by the trash barrel in the service hall, maybe jes’ setting on the stair.”

I might have known, I told myself bitterly, that the performance of the night before was too smooth not to have been staged before.

“Just whose water pitchers, Laura, have-er-behaved in this provoking manner?” I inquired.

She gave me a curious look, and not for the first time I wondered if there was anything about any one of us which the old maid did not pack under her cap.

“Well,” she said at last with obvious reluctance, “there was Miss Polly’s pitcher three-four times last winter, and Miss Mary’s acts up about every week. And den there’s that poor little Mosby gal, only she’s daid now, and dat Miss Crain what packed up and left so sudden-like last week, and several others I disremember, because they hadn’t been here long and they sort of got out, too, in a hurry.”

“Mary and Polly and Lottie Mosby!” I gasped in a stricken voice.

“Yas ’m. Mr Mosby mighty near took the roof off about it,” said Laura sulkily. “Like I could help it if de water pitcher loses hitself, and Miss Mosby has a weeping fit over a lot of little torn-up pieces of brown paper what she wouldn’t ’splain to him about.”

Laura was still mumbling to herself when she went out. Because my knees felt very weak, I tottered to a chair and practically collapsed into it. So I was not the only person at the Richelieu who had received a scurrilous brown note, nor was I alone in having, like a gullible fool, complied with its instructions. I knew then why Mary Lawson was in financial difficulties and I felt sure that the appointment she had had on the fourth floor landing of the fire escape the night James Reid was murdered was not with a man but had to do with an aluminium water pitcher.

“Only what has Mary, of all women, ever done to land herself in the clutches of a blackmailer?” I asked myself in a baffled voice.

I never doubted from then on that blackmail was being practiced on an extensive scale at the Richelieu Hotel and had been for some time, but I was convinced that one of the victims had tried to turn on his persecutor. For that, I felt positive, was the secret of James Reid’s presence in the house. He had been retained to ferret out the secret of the blackmailer’s identity. Retained by Mary Lawson, I told myself with conviction.

“That is what she meant when she intimated that her hands were stained with his blood,” I sighed. “She brought him here to his death, poor Mary.”

I was also able for the first time to account to my satisfaction for the reason why Mary had wanted me out of my rooms between eight and nine on that fatal night and why James Reid should have been murdered in my suite of all places.

If, as I suspected, Mary Lawson had been ordered by the blackmailer to place a sum of money in her water pitcher and leave it on the fire escape that evening, it was perfectly plausible, or so I thought, that James Reid, like myself, had considered the trap set and concealed himself in my old quarters next door in order to nab the culprit in the act. Only the dastard had proved too clever for him also, for it was his own neck upon which the trap snapped.

I shuddered. “I shall have to tell the inspector everything,” I concluded with a groan. “No matter whom it involves. Hanging is too good for such canaille!”

I was distracted from my painful thoughts by a brusque knock at the door and upon opening it was startled to find Kathleen Adair on the threshold.

“I brought them back,” she said in a bleak voice.

I stared blankly at the neat white box she held out to me.

“Didn’t you expect me to?” she asked and added with a bitter smile, “No matter what you think of us, you might at least give me credit for returning everything I could.”

I did not answer. I couldn’t. I could only go on staring at the coil of lustrous red garnets in the box which she had thrust into my hand.

At last the girl said in a halting stammer, “She doesn’t mean to steal, you know. She’s good, really good. You’ve got to believe me. It’s just that-that she thinks beauty is everybody’s birth right and she can’t bear for the people she loves to be without it.”

My lips were so dry I could barely move them. “Your-your mother takes things?” She nodded drearily. “Only you were right; my name isn’t Adair, and she isn’t my mother.”

“Thank God!” I whispered to myself.

“I don’t remember my mother, and my father died three years ago. He had been ill for a long while and out of work. I don’t know what we should have done except for-for Mother.” Her lips quivered.

“I call her that because it makes her happier than anything.”

“My dear child!”

“We had rooms at her house. After Father fell ill, we couldn’t pay, only she wouldn’t let us leave. She has a tiny income but she is quite alone in the world and she’s never been strong. She said we were all she had to live for.”

“She was in love with your father?” I stammered.

She nodded and I suppose she read in my eyes the question I dared not ask, for she said, “He was never in love with her. I am sure you know, Miss Adams, the only woman my father ever loved.”

“He must have loved your mother.”

She shook her head. “He would never have married her if you hadn’t driven him away from you,” she protested and then went on with a reproach which cut me to the quick, “How could you when he loved you so?”

“I was blind and stupid, my dear, and unfair both to him and to myself,” I faltered. “My father was a hopeless invalid; he had been for years. I convinced myself I had no right to sacrifice Laurie’s youth, as well as my own. There was a girl visiting friends of his. He showed her some small attentions, through common courtesy. I was half ill from long hours by a sickbed.

“I told Laurie that lengthy engagements like ours wore all the glamour off a love affair. I said we’d both be happier free. I said I’d got over caring for him. I taunted him with the visiting girl and handed him back his ring and the brooch he’d given me. The next day he – they were married and left town. I never saw him again.”

“You broke his morale. He never seemed to care about anything. It ruined his life.”

“And my own.”

“Maybe you hated him for marrying my mother, but he always loved you,” she said sadly.

“I have only myself to blame, Kathleen, for wrecking our happiness. Though to this day there are people in town who will tell you that Laurie Yorke jilted Adelaide Adams because she was too dutiful and noble a character to sacrifice her ailing father to her lover.”

“He did tell me to come to you if ever I needed a friend,” she said softly. “He told me just before he died.”

“My dear, my dear!”

“But when I met you,” she whispered, “you were not the Adelaide he described to me, and I-I was afraid.”

I winced. “Duty ate up twenty of the best years of my life, Kathleen, and left me a hateful and disagreeable old woman.”

“You are not! You’re infinitely kind, only by the time I found you out,” she said with a little sob, “it was too late.”

“It’s never too late for you and me to be friends, Kathleen.”

She shook her head. “Do you think I’d drag anyone else down into my private gutter?” she asked fiercely.

Her eyes fastened on the bright red stones which I had tossed upon the table. “If it’s your mother, dear, perhaps I can help,” I stammered.

Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve told you before. No one can help – no one.”

“It’s a disease, isn’t it?” I asked gently. “They call it kleptomania, I think.”

She nodded. “When she’s well, she can sometimes throw it off, but if she’s ill or worried, she can’t seem to help herself.”

Our eyes met, and with a sinking heart I recalled what the inspector had said about the disastrous results of subjecting a diseased or degenerating brain to a severe strain.

“When my father was ill,” went on Kathleen, so low I could barely hear, “she was terribly distressed about him. She could not bear for him to do without things, little luxuries and – and delicacies, you know. Every time she went out she brought him out of season fruits and flowers and-and other things. He was too ill and I was too young to wonder where the money came from.”

“You mean she picked them up wherever she could?”

“Her fingers are never still; haven’t you noticed?” I nodded, my mouth again terribly dry.

“For all they are so frail,” said Kathleen sadly, “they can slide into your pocket and out without so much as touching you.”

“It seems incredible!”

“You didn’t know when she lifted the garnets off your neck last night under the inspector’s very eyes?”

I shook my head weakly.

“I tried to bring them back at once,” she said, “before you missed them, but the window on the fire escape was locked.”

“That’s when you lost the rose out of your hair,” I said huskily.

She flushed. “I didn’t want to take it. That man – Stephen Lansing – knows.”

“About your mother?”

“Yes, and” – she swallowed painfully – “I haven’t told you the worst. She’s been in the penitentiary.”

“That fragile little creature!”

“It wrecked her health. She isn’t going to live very long, and there’s nothing the doctors can do. That’s why...”

She broke off and then went on almost hysterically, “I’d rather die than see her go back to that place!”