Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (22 page)

“Miss Otis regrets that she cannot dine with you tonight,

because, cheerio, she has a date to be lynched this afternoon.”

However, when I winced in spite of myself his smile faded and he said earnestly, “Don’t let it get you down, Adelaide. The inspector only looks like a fool. He knows as well as I do that, regardless of your pose, you’re too tender hearted to kill the proverbial gnat.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I doubt if a one of us, including the inspector himself, knows how much we know or has the faintest idea what it means.”

He coloured. “Did you tell him about-about...” He paused and looked unhappy.

“About the rose on the fire escape and what window you bounced out of last night?” I asked and shook my head.

“No,” I said, “there are a number of things I haven’t told the inspector yet. Including the remarkable way in which you rang the lobby clock with your hat this morning. I haven’t told him for the adequate reason that, quite early in the session upstairs, he informed me that, things having reached the pass they have, he’d ask the questions and I could speak when and as spoken to.”

He drew a breath of relief, and I went on unsteadily, “But I shall have to tell him everything, Stephen. Right away! As soon as I can bring myself to demand his attention.”

“Yes?” he drawled, knitting his heavy brows.

My voice was pleading, almost tearful. “One can’t go on indefinitely, letting people be killed off as though – as though they were flies being swatted; not if one can do anything to prevent it.”

“Are you developing scruples at this late date, Adelaide?” asked Stephen in a hard voice and then added with a curl of his wide sardonic mouth, “Well, you know the risks as well as I do. So if you think its healthy let your conscience be your guide.”

Our eyes met, and for the second time in less than twelve hours I could not for the life of me decide if his mocking grin conveyed a warning or a threat.

At that moment Letty Jones, regarding me with resentment, put her head around the door which led into the lobby. “There’s a man to see you, Miss Adams,” she announced with a sniff.

It always provokes Letty to have to put herself to any trouble for the women guests at the Richelieu. Men are different. Letty belongs to that class of females which titters and gushes over everything masculine and thinks nothing too inconvenient to do for the lords of creation – which is what she would call them.

“A man to see me?” I repeated with a frown.

Letty sniffed again, nodded and withdrew, while Stephen with a chuckle assisted me off the stool on which, considering my bulk, I had been somewhat precariously mounted.

“I didn’t realize you had another gentleman friend, Addie,” he murmured with his old impudence.

As I came into the lobby Letty looked up from her rapt contemplation of the inkwell on the desk and shrugged one shoulder toward a young man, standing barely inside the front door and looking embarrassed in clean, though faded, overalls. I stared at him blankly. I had never to my knowledge seen him before, nor did I place him even when, advancing to meet me, he betrayed a slight limp.

“Miss Adams?” he inquired. I nodded, and he went on in an apologetic voice, “I know I haven’t any right to bother a lady like you and I realize I’m not dressed fit for a place like this. But” – he swallowed painfully – “Annie told me how kind you was to her.”

“Annie?”

“My wife, the-the girl who waits table here.”

“Your wife did you say?” I demanded in a puzzled voice.

He flushed. “She never told nobody she was married when she took the job. You see, I-I’m a lineman for the telegraph company, but I happened to have a little accident the other day. Twisted my ankle, mowing our front lawn, and I’ve got to lay off for a while. And-and Annie and me have had a lot of expense lately, her father’s death and all, and we’re trying to pay for our little house out on Biddle Street. Annie thought it would help a lot if she could get something to do till I go back to work, so she-she-”

“Palmed herself off as a single girl,” I said, frowning.

“It’s not easy for a married woman to get a job since the depression,” he explained ruefully.

I was weakening, but I still retained my suspicions.

“And what might all this have to do with me?” I asked.

Little haggard lines leaped out on his sober homely face. “Annie said you was kind, kinder than anybody here,” he stammered. “And I-I thought... Something’s happened to Annie.”

“Something’s happened to her?”

“She didn’t come home yesterday afternoon. She didn’t come home last night. She-she hasn’t been home since-since yesterday morning.”

He was staring at the cap which he kept turning over and over in his hands, but I had seen the terror in his eyes. Poor young fellow, I thought to myself and was amazed that I could have been so deceived in a girl. Until that moment I would have sworn that the timid little waitress I had known was the last woman on earth to desert her shabby, though obviously decent, young husband.

“I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could. “I know nothing about your wife except that she told Mr Fancher, the manager of the Coffee Shop, she was leaving yesterday for a better position.”

His voice was thin with distress. “But she didn’t leave.”

“What?”

“I’ve always walked to and from work with Annie.” His lips trembled. “I walked to work with Annie yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon I waited for her down on the corner, but-but she never came.”

My sympathies went out to the poor young husband. “I’m afraid your wife has-has...” My throat felt thick. “Annie undoubtedly had her reasons for not telling you that she was giving up her place here,” I said uncomfortably.

His eyes opened wide. “But Annie and I told each other everything. She never had a secret from me in her life, ma’am. Why why” – he was clutching my arm in his eagerness to convince me – “she even got me to teach her the Morse code, and often when we are around other people we telegraph little messages to each other. You know, tap them out with our knuckles on a chair or a table. We think it’s cute, ’cause nobody else is any the wiser.” His fingers tightened on my elbow. “I can’t believe it. My Annie wouldn’t leave me for another job or-or another man or anything.”

“But she hasn’t been here since she went off duty at lunch yesterday,” I persisted.

He was trembling. “I tell you, she never left here.”

I stared at him incredulously. “But –”

“I was watching for her.”

“I know, but –”

“I could see the employees’ entrance from where I stood.”

“Perhaps so, but –”

“She never came out of the hotel.”

It was then I had my second brain storm, one that came so close to costing me my life that I can scarcely bear to think of it even yet.

“Merciful heavens!” I gasped, grasping the back of a chair to steady myself.

I have said I never forget anything, though I may mislay it for a while, and I was recalling many obscure and curious incidents which had puzzled me at the time but to which I had been unable to find the key; only now they were falling into a pattern, a pattern so sinister it made my brain reel.

“Have-have you reported your wife’s disappearance to the police?” I faltered.

He paled. “Then you, too, think something awful has happened to her?” he whispered.

I could not speak, and he put his hand to his quivering mouth.

“I haven’t done anything,” he gasped, “except walk the street up and down, up and down, between here and the corner, watching for her – for her to come out.”

I was trembling all over. There were a dozen things I wanted to do at once. I flung a distracted glance at the lobby clock. It was a quarter after two. The Coffee Shop had been closed for over twenty minutes. It was then my right eye began to twitch with an acute attack of nerves which it has never got entirely over.

“Wait here,” I cried, shoving Conrad Wilson down into a chair. “Don’t stir till I come back. I want to take you to Inspector Bunyan, but-but there’s something I must do first.”

If only I’m not too late, I thought as I hobbled swiftly through the lobby and out the back into the long corridor which separates the kitchen of the Richelieu Hotel on the left from the Beauty Shop on the right. I dare say I looked pretty much like a wild woman when I thrust my head in at the door where Belle, the dishwasher, and Gene, the chef, were just removing their greasy aprons, preparatory to going out for a few hours before time to start dinner.

“That girl – that waitress Gloria! Has she gone yet?” I demanded jerkily, because I still could not seem to draw a full breath.

Gene stared at me in astonishment, but Belle did not turn a hair at my unprecedented intrusion behind the scenes.

“No ’m, she ain’t gone, Miss Adams,” she said, calmly untying her apron.

“Thank God!” I whispered.

“The other girl left right at two,” Belle went on, “but dat Gloria’s quitting, so she had to wait till Mr Fancher brung her check.”

“Oh!” I wailed, the stitch in my side growing more pronounced.

“Where is she?” Belle glanced at me curiously. “Down in the dressing room, I guess, taking off her uniform. Leastwise I ain’t heard her come up yet.”

I had forgotten that, because of limited kitchen space on the first floor, there was a dressing room of sorts in the basement of the hotel which the waitresses in the Coffee Shop were permitted to use when they changed into street clothes or vice versa.

“She went down to the basement?” I gasped.

“Yas ’m.”

“And you haven’t heard her come up?”

“No ’m.”

For an instant I heard Gloria Larue’s voice as distinctly as I had heard it at breakfast that morning. “When a feller’s got nobody but himself to back his play,” she had said, “he gets used to taking it on the chin.”

My heart was beating in great furious throbs as I turned back to the corridor. It all fitted, fitted perfectly, into a horrible pattern.

I knew at last why so many of the waitresses whom Cyril Fancher employed were on their own with no one to inquire if apparently the earth yawned and swallowed them. I knew, too, why he had discouraged them from talking to the guests, and why they never stayed long at the Richelieu, and why they had all been young and fresh and pretty.

“Please, God,” I prayed as I stumbled down the corridor, “let me be in time.”

I had been in the basement of the Richelieu many times, but not by way of the narrow staircase which opened off the rear hall between the door into the kitchen and the employees’ entry. There is under the lobby a large concrete storage room for trunks and so forth to which I had often descended in the elevator when I had winter furs to put away in mothballs or summer frocks to take out of tissue paper.

I had previously seen for myself that the dark passage to the west of the elevator in the basement ran back toward the rear of the house, and I knew, of course, that there had to be a boiler room and such in the nether regions of the basement. I also, as I have said, had some vague knowledge that the waitresses’ dressing room was down there somewhere.

However, I had never had any occasion to go farther back than the elevator stop, and as I started down the rear stair I had no idea of the layout or where I could expect to find the room to which Gloria Larue had gone. But to my relief both the steep steps and the corridor below were well lighted by a powerful drop bulb on the landing of the staircase which halfway down made an abrupt right-angled turn, so that while you were facing east when you started down, you were headed due west on the second flight.

I had no difficulty locating the entrance to the boiler room. It was well to the front of the basement, though at that distance from the bulb on the landing the corridor was dim and shadowy. Nor did I have any trouble discovering the dressing room. As I came around the bend in the stairs it was directly before me, next to the laundry chute. The door was closed, but I could hear the water running in the lavatory.

“Thank God,” I cried, “she’s still there!”

At that instant the powerful lamp above my head went out, plunging me into a blackness so intense I could not have seen my hand before me had I had the strength to lift it. I believe my heart, the very blood in my veins, stood still. For a second I could not move, I could not even think.

I was conscious of stealthy footsteps near me, nearer and nearer, and of a ghastly panting like some animal, but whether from below or above I could not tell for the roar of my blood in my ears.

And then with a choking sound that was an aborted shriek, I whirled around, flinging my arms out to ward off that nameless horror converging upon me. The next instant those dreadful squeezing hands were at my throat, grinding, clawing, digging deeper and deeper into my windpipe.

Slowly the shooting red lights in my congested eyeballs began to wink out and the agony in my cramped lungs to subside. I gulped once, twice, and then started to fight for air with a weird strangled sound which made my ears ache.

“Take it easy, Adelaide,” said Stephen from somewhere quite near me.

It was still pitch dark in the basement, but the sound of his familiar and solicitous voice broke down my last defences and precipitated the hysterics on the verge of which I had been trembling ever since I realized what had most likely happened to poor Conrad Wilson’s Annie.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” I shrieked, and then again, like a fire siren, “O-oh! O-oh!”

“Steady, Adelaide,” murmured Stephen, close to my shoulder, and put his arm about me. “You’ve been too grand a soldier to blow up when we’re on the spot. Hang on!”

I proceeded to do just that, flinging both arms about his neck and trying desperately to hang onto him and my sanity at the same time. And that was how the inspector found us when, having turned on the light from the switch at the head of the stair, he plunged down the basement steps, a drawn revolver in his hand, mate to the one which the policeman Sweeney was flourishing as he stumbled breathlessly after his superior.

“Tableau!” murmured Stephen Lansing.

The inspector stopped so abruptly, his henchman had to sit down violently on the steps to keep from stumbling over him. From the landing they stared down at us in the corridor below, now garishly illuminated by the drop light on the stair.