Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (23 page)

“Aw,” said Sweeney disgustedly, “it’s just them two up to their playful little tricks again.”

The inspector, however, was staring with a shocked expression at the angry dark-red marks on my throat.

“What’s happened to you, Miss Adams?” he asked tremulously.

I had by this time sufficiently recovered myself to release my strangle hold on Stephen’s neck and was attempting to look dignified and at the same time pin back in place the row of false curls which somewhere in the encounter had become detached from my forehead and was draped about my aquiline nose.

“I should think it’s self-evident what happened to me, Inspector,” I said tartly.

Behind me Stephen chuckled. “Hamlet is herself again.”

“The murderer attacked you!” cried the inspector.

“Someone or something certainly attacked me,” I said, wincing as I felt of the sore and aching muscles in my neck.

“Who is he? Did you see him? Where did he go?” The barrage of questions was shot at me by the inspector and Sweeney, both simultaneously and separately.

“I don’t know is the answer to everything, so far as I’m concerned,” I said wearily. “He-it-the light went out suddenly and-and – I don’t even know whether he crept toward me down the stairs or up them from the basement. He was just there, somewhere near me, panting like a wild beast, and then – and then his hands were grinding the life out of me.”

“This here is a two-way switch,” announced Sweeney, who had been poking his flashlight here and there into shadowy corners.

“It can be turned off from the top of the stairs or down here at the foot, whichever switch you happen to be at.”

“And a lot of help that is,” murmured Stephen Lansing sarcastically.

The inspector scowled. “Just where did you come in on this, Lansing?” he inquired.

Perhaps I have neglected to state that since Hilda Anthony’s tragic death that morning the inspector had shed his polite nicety of manner and reverted to a startling brusqueness, reminiscent of the hard-boiled detectives I have so often encountered in mystery novels, the kind who chew savagely on unlighted cigars and glare at the suspects with unmistakable ferocity while snarling unprintable epithets through their discoloured teeth.

“I came in just as you did, Inspector, by the door on the lobby floor,” said Stephen smoothly. “Barely in time, in fact, to aim a flying tackle at Miss Adams’ assailant which, I regret to confess to the lady, knocked her end over end down the staircase.”

I understood then why I felt so alarmingly sore and bruised in a region of my anatomy which until that time I was not aware had been attacked.

“The-er-murderer,” continued Stephen, “took advantage of the mêlée to scuttle away into-into... I have no idea just where he did scuttle away to, Inspector.”

“Oh yeah?” murmured Sweeney.

“Surely if you were on the landing, as you must have been to knock Miss Adams off it, Lansing, your ears told you whether the murderer went upstairs or down.”

Stephen grinned at me. “Miss Adams is a bit on the hefty side, Inspector, begging your pardon, Adelaide. And she does everything thoroughly. I mean, when she falls, it’s rather like the Tower of Pisa coming down. You should have been able to hear the commotion upstairs.”

“I suppose you are cognizant, Lansing, that there is no apparent reason why it couldn’t have been you who first strangled Miss Adams and then pitched her down the stairs?” demanded the inspector.

I caught my breath. After all, I had told Stephen Lansing that I was going to the police with all the information which I possessed and he had as good as warned me that such a move was not healthy.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Inspector Bunyan,” I stammered. “Why should Mr Lansing have tried to kill me one minute and then do all he could the next to save my life?”

“That fall of yours, Miss Adams, was enough to wake the dead,” said the inspector dryly. “After it came off, Stephen Lansing’s only hope was to reverse the act before the police got here and allow himself to be discovered in the role of your rescuer.”

“Granting,” put in Stephen, “that it was I who strangled her in the first place.”

“I’ll say we grant it!” sang out Sweeney lustily. The inspector nodded. “You have never rung quite true to me, Lansing.”

“Isn’t that just too bad?” drawled Stephen.

“There remains the fact that you did call up James Reid from the Sally Ray Beauty Shop the afternoon he was murdered and threaten to knock his block off if he did not stop his infernal snooping.”

Stephen changed colour. “So you know about that,” he said somewhat lamely.

“The more I consider you, the queerer you look to me, Lansing.”

“Do tell!” murmured Stephen sweetly, but it seemed to me a little uneasily.

“Always fully dressed and first on the scene at any hour of the night!” continued the inspector in a tone of unconcealed scorn.

“Bounding up fire escapes like a Leaping Lena!” muttered Sweeney by way of reinforcement.

“Can you give any legitimate excuse for how you came to be in the basement at the moment Miss Adams was attacked?” demanded the inspector sternly.

Stephen grinned. “Incredible as it seems, Inspector, I had a hunch.”

“A hunch!” repeated the inspector, looking outraged.

“That Miss Adams, of whom I happen to be rather fond, was barging straight into a chunk of trouble, and so I made up my mind not to let her out of my sight.”

“You admit you followed her down here,” said the inspector ominously.

“I was just in time to see her coat-tail swish through the basement door when I came out of the lobby, Inspector. My hunch caused me to quicken my steps. I have never fancied basements when there are murderers around. I had no more than closed the door behind myself when the light went out in my face. I must have stood there for a second or two, blinking but otherwise quite motionless.

It was then I heard Miss Adams choking for breath on the landing and took my flying tackle into the unknown.”

“Do you seriously expect me to fall for such twaddle?” protested the inspector.

“Yes,” cried Sweeney belligerently, “do you think I and the inspector are prize jackasses?”

“I wouldn’t say you were exactly prizes,” murmured Stephen with his most provoking grin, though I thought he looked pretty pale about the gills.

“Something has occurred to me, Inspector,” I said, drawing a long breath, “which should settle once for all if it was Stephen Lansing who attacked me.”

“Yes, Miss Adams?” murmured the inspector sceptically.

“I have just remembered that I bit my assailant.”

“Bit him!” cried the inspector in a scandalized voice.

“You would, Adelaide – or the like of that,” said Stephen with a faint chuckle.

“I twisted my head around and fastened my teeth in his arm a little above the wrist,” I went on with a shudder.

“Blow me down!” gasped Sweeney.

“It brought the blood, Inspector, because just before I lost consciousness, I-I tasted it, hot and salty on my lips.”

“Did I say she was a werewolf,” exploded Sweeney, “or did I say she was a werewolf!”

Stephen was rolling up his sleeves to above the elbow. “Not guilty, Inspector!” he cried, his eyes again beginning to dance as he extended two smooth muscular brown arms.

The inspector stared from one to the other of us with an exasperated scowl. “That’s either a remarkably well-thought-up yarn, Miss Adams, for the spur of the moment, or a peculiarly fortuitous set of circumstances for Stephen Lansing,” he said sarcastically.

“However, I don’t imagine without proof you’d expect me – or a jury – to credit it.”

“I have proof, Inspector,” I replied coolly and pointed to my chin on which there was a slowly drying crimson stain.

“You will have to admit,” I remarked with a sniff, “that while I have been choked and otherwise promiscuously knocked about, the skin on my body is unbroken. Or would you prefer to have a policewoman examine me to make certain?”

The inspector groaned, and Stephen Lansing laughed. “Checkmate!” he said and added flippantly, “No hits, no runs, no errors, Inspector. Your side’s retired.”

The inspector flung up his hands with an exasperated gesture, and Patrolman Sweeney, not bothering to conceal his disgruntled expression, began again to throw his flashlight into the shadowy corners of the basement.

“I don’t see how even a werewolf,” he grumbled, “could bite a man hard enough to make him leak blood all over the place.”

“What!” shouted the inspector. “Give me that flashlight.”

Not from the minute the murderer’s hands closed about my throat until that thin blade of yellow light fell upon the thick scarlet trail, leading from near the foot of the basement stair to the door of the waitresses’ dressing room, did I remember my mission in that evil-looking place.

“The girl!” I gasped. “God forgive me, I forgot her!”

The inspector stared at me as if at last he was sure I had lost my senses, and Sweeney muttering “Bats in the belfry, and how!” put his blunt fingers to his temple and revolved them in an elaborate circle, but Stephen, turning deathly white, seized my arm and began to shake me violently.

“The girl? What girl? For heaven’s sake, say something!” he cried.

I do not quite know how he expected me to speak with my chin waving in the air like a banner, but I finally managed to gasp, “The waitress, Gloria Larue, from the Coffee Shop! She-she came down here to-to change her clothes and-and she hasn’t come up again.”

Before I finished, Stephen was pounding on the dressing-room door. It was locked, which delayed him only a moment. Putting his broad shoulder to the upper panel, he lunged like a battering ram.

There was a rending crash, a screech as the lock tore out of the decaying wood of the frame, and then he was inside with me at his heels, after having accidentally, or maybe not quite accidentally, tripped Patrolman Sweeney with my broad Cuban heel as I brushed by him, leaving him, as it happened, hors de combat on his hands and knees like a gigantic half-opened jack-knife against which Inspector Bunyan came up with a thud which temporarily unhorsed the two of them.

The dressing room was empty.

It was a bare, depressing room with whitewashed concrete walls and floors. A dingy skylight near the ceiling shed a sepulchral light from the paved alleyway behind the hotel. There were two narrow steel lockers, the doors sagging open, the locks rusty and broken; a soiled towel dangling limply from a nail by the tin lavatory over which hung a peeling looking glass; and absolutely nothing else except the thick red splotch just over the threshold at which Stephen Lansing was staring with sickened eyes.

“Oh!” I cried. “I can’t bear any more!”

I turned away, putting my hands up to shut out the sight. In front of me Officer Sweeney, still breathing stertorously, came to an abrupt halt and Inspector Bunyan forgot the furious remark he had been about to make, as they, too, spied that sinister patch of crimson at their feet.

“So he got her also,” said the inspector huskily.

“Jees!” quavered Sweeney.

Stephen, his face a mask, pushed me aside to reach the corridor again. “Glory! Glory! Where are you?” he shouted.

“Dead women tell no tales,” muttered Sweeney with a gloomy nod, absent-mindedly massaging his skinned knees.

“Glory, for God’s sake!” shouted Stephen again. “Give me a sign!”

“I tell you ...” began Sweeney, tenderly rubbing his bruised palms.

“Keep still, you fool!” cried Stephen fiercely.

“Say,” protested Sweeney, “I and the inspector – I mean, the inspector’s the guy who gives the orders around here.”

“Keep still, flatfoot!” growled the inspector.

Sweeney glanced at him incredulously and then, looking highly abused, gingerly felt of his battered port side and lapsed into injured silence.

“Glory! Glory!” cried Stephen again. “Answer me!”

And then we heard it, that faint scratching sound no louder than a mouse nibbling in the baseboard; only in the concrete basement there was no baseboard. To give the inspector his due, it was he who first located the packing case behind the furnace, along with a lot of other empty wooden boxes and crates, piled up there to be burned as trash, I suppose; but this case was not empty.

Gently Stephen lifted that doubled-up figure out of its hiding place. Cursing softly under his breath, he tore off the soiled towel which was twisted between Gloria Larue’s teeth and tied behind her head. Still cursing, he untied the towel knotted about her wrists and the other one around her ankles. I might say here they were the regulation Hotel Richelieu hand towels of which at least a hundred went down the laundry chute to the basement every day.

“By heaven, Glory, if they’ve hurt you...” cried Stephen, clenching his fists.

She smiled weakly and, in a voice I had never heard before, said, “ ’Sall right, Chief. I can take it.”

“Chief!” exclaimed Sweeney hoarsely.

“Chief!” I gasped.

“Chief?” repeated the inspector, looking very odd.

Stephen did not pay us the least attention. “For heaven’s sake, Glory, I warned you that the phony notice from the radio company was the signal for the pay-off,” he groaned. “Why-why didn’t you watch your step, my dear fool?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Just thought I was smart, Chief, a heck of a lot smarter than I am.”

“And so walked right into his clutches,” said Stephen bitterly.

“Everybody has his lapses,” she admitted with an abashed and tremulous grin. “I knew as soon as I got the notice of the alleged audition, the stage was set, but I-I made one mistake.” She shivered. “And but for you it would have been my last one. I thought I was safe as long as the pistol in my hand was levelled on Cyril Fancher.”

“Cyril, yes!” I cried huskily.

She did not look at me. “I had always believed,” she said in a puzzled and resentful voice, “that of all the yellow skunks on God’s green footstool the yellowest is the white slaver.”

“White slaver!” whispered the inspector.

Stephen Lansing and the level-eyed girl whom he called Glory had no time to waste on anyone except each other.

“I learned,” she said with a rueful frown, “that even a skunk is dangerous when the rope starts to coil around his neck.”