Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (24 page)

“Yes,” said Stephen grimly. “So what?”

“The minute he told me to wait in the dressing room for my check I knew what to expect.”

“Yes, yes! Go on.”

“I changed my clothes and then I stood to the left of the door, my gun in the pocket of my coat, my finger on the trigger.”

“All right! What happened?”

“He must have seen by my face that I was onto him or else something else had got him on the run, for he came in at the door fighting. I mean, I never had a chance to fire the gun. I never even had a look at him. His fist shot out. Five thousand stars exploded in my head. When I came to I was tied up like a parcel-post package.” She shivered. “Consigned to the furnace sometime late tonight, I think.”

“God knows I hope there is a special hot spot reserved for him in hell!” cried Stephen Lansing, gritting his teeth. “To have let him slip through my fingers when I practically had him hog-tied is the bitterest dose I’ve tried to swallow in a long and lousy career.”

“He can’t have got far, Chief. You’ll catch him yet,” she faltered.

“After we’ve exposed our hand! Be your age, Quacky,” he muttered bitterly, at which the inspector and Sweeney exchanged a surreptitious and highly triumphant glance.

The girl’s shoulders drooped. “I’m sorry I spoiled everything for you.”

Stephen laid his hand with rough affection on her arm. “Good Lord, kid,” he cried, “I’m not blaming you. You said he came in the door fighting. Something tipped him off.”

He glanced around at us for the first time and at sight of my stricken face paused and shook his head, “Adelaide, Adelaide, what did you do to flush the game?”

I swallowed. “Nothing, unless he saw me talking to Annie’s husband in the lobby.”

“Annie!”

“The-the waitress who disappeared yesterday.”

His face greyed. “Disappeared? But she can’t have! I mean, he would never have tried to sell her down the river. She has a home and a husband, someone to raise a row if she drops out of sight. I know, because both James Reid and I at various times followed her to find out.”

“But Cyril didn’t know,” I stammered. “She passed herself off on him as a single woman.”

“God!” groaned Stephen Lansing. “And I was that sure she was safe, I never even tried to keep an eye on her.”

There was an aching silence, and then in a small voice Inspector Bunyan inquired, “Would you mind telling me what this is all about, er-Mr Lansing?”

“Special Agent Lansing,” corrected the girl with a snap, “of the United States Service commonly known as G men.”

“God!” exclaimed Policeman Sweeney in an awed voice.

“And my assistant and good Girl Friday,” said Stephen with a faint smile, “Miss Gloriana Quackenberry.”

“It’s my real name, Inspector,” said the girl in answer to the astonished incredulity on his face. “Because why? Because nobody would wish such a handle on themselves.”

“I suppose not,” stammered Inspector Bunyan.

“As for what it’s all about, Inspector,” said Stephen Lansing with a sigh, “for nearly a year the federal government has known that a traffic in young girls is being conducted in this section of the country. The shipping point is New Orleans, where they are loaded in crates on ships bound for the Argentine and ultimately for one or another house on the South American water front.”

I shivered uncontrollably.

“We managed to intercept one of the shipments,” Stephen said grimly, “but the shippers had been tipped off. The human cargo was dead when we got to them.”

“Oh!” I gasped.

“We succeeded in striking the trail of another of the victims in transit. She wrote a note and threw it out of the blind truck in which she was being transported to New Orleans. But long before it reached us she was tossed out on the highway and the truck backed up over her.”

“Gwendolyn!” I cried. “The waitress who was supposed to have been killed accidentally, hitchhiking her way to Hollywood!”

Stephen nodded. “She had no people. At the place where she roomed they did not even know where she worked last. We were pretty sure what had happened to her, but the only thing we had to go on from there was a table napkin in her possession with a laundry mark which we were able to trace to the Richelieu Hotel.”

“Oh!” I gasped again.

“That’s why I’ve been here for the past month, Inspector, or scouting around in the near-by towns, supposedly demonstrating cosmetics.” He made a wry face. “Actually checking up on the twenty or thirty girls who have disappeared in this vicinity during the past year.”

“Twenty or thirty!” I whispered.

“Besides the table napkin, I had no reason, Inspector, for believing that the pickup was being operated from this hotel, except another hunch,” said Stephen, again smiling faintly.

“Yes sir,” said the inspector humbly.

“To be quite frank, my immediate superiors thought I was wasting my time, as did a number of other people.” He flashed me a wry smile. “Wasting my time on a lot of silly women! As if,” he said with a grimace, “one can turn up a ground rat without digging into the dirt around him.”

“Yes sir, of course,” said the inspector.

“Until day before yesterday it even seemed to me I had been terribly busy chasing a pipe dream. Having spaded into the private history of every woman in the house, I discovered nothing remotely resembling what I was seeking, with the exception of the poor Mosby girl, who was a side issue. Then overnight hell began to pop. I suppose when he killed Reid he needed money, and plenty of it, to cover up. Or maybe he planned to make one last big haul for a quick getaway if things got too hot for him. Anyway, he took on Glory here, whom I had had hanging around for weeks, begging for a job in the Coffee Shop, and I believed the trap was set.”

That had a familiar ring. “But he was too cunning for you,” I faltered.

Stephen Lansing sighed. “Yes.”

Policeman Sweeney slowly closed his gaping mouth and gave his burly shoulders a little shake. “I still don’t see how he could have done all that bleeding from one little bite in the wrist,” he murmured plaintively.

Special Agent Lansing glanced ruefully at his assistant. “You said everybody has his lapses, Glory. That poor Annie is mine, and, God help us, in our business a mistake is nearly always fatal.”

“You mean, it-it’s her blood?” I cried.

He nodded, and, thinking of that pitiful young husband whom I had left upstairs, I began to weep heartbrokenly, while Stephen put his arm about my shoulder and murmured huskily, “Would I could mingle my tears with yours, Adelaide.”

It developed that the inspector, in the very act of racing to my rescue, had planted several policemen at the head of the rear stairs, also at the elevator – the only exits, as he thought, to the basement.

That explained the smug expression on his face when Stephen Lansing bewailed the escape of his quarry. Undoubtedly the inspector had visions of covering himself with fame by a smashing victory at the expense of the federal man. However, the guards stationed at the proper entrances to the basement had nothing to report except that no one, not even a cockroach, had attempted to get by them.

It did come out that, shortly before I screamed, the bell on the elevator rang from the basement, but Jake, the day man, insisted that when he descended in the car there was nobody there, although he waited a few minutes, waited, in fact, until my bloodcurdling shriek scared him out of his wits. When he came to, both he and the elevator were shaking with fright on the lobby floor.

The policemen, stationed at that point, corroborated Jake’s testimony. He had been, they admitted, entirely alone when he brought the car up from the basement. I believed the inspector toyed with the idea for a while that Jake himself might be the culprit. Jake has barely sense enough to tote heavy suitcases in and out of the hotel and to push the lever on the elevator for up or down.

Fortunately for him, Ella Trotter was able to swear that Jake was taking her up to her floor when the bell rang in the basement. She heard him grumbling something about there being ghosts in the cellar, because they were always ringing for the car but nobody was ever there. Ella herself glanced at the light numbered ‘B’ in the row of signals. As she stared at it, it winked violently, proving that at that very moment someone was savagely punching the bell beside the stop in the basement.

“Then he’s still here somewhere!” cried the inspector, looking bitterly disappointed and quite savage.

“Not that bird,” muttered Stephen morosely.

The inspector, summoning more policemen, insisted, nonetheless, on making a painstaking search of every nook and cranny under the Richelieu Hotel. Stephen, obviously not at all optimistic of the outcome, joined the searching party, and I, beginning to feel very sore and hoarse, decided to leave them with it. Accompanied by Miss Gloriana Quackenberry, who was somewhat the worse for wear herself, I ascended, with many twinges and a tendency to wheeze, to the upper regions of the house.

Poor Conrad Wilson was still sitting where I had left him in the chair by the lobby door, his face as dull as if a light had gone out behind it. I went over and tried to murmur something consoling, only I am sure he did not hear me or even know I was there.

After a while a policeman came who said Mr Lansing wished Mr Wilson to go upstairs and try to get some rest in Mr Lansing’s room till the police had time to talk to him. Still with that blank, unseeing face poor Annie’s husband permitted himself to be led away.

“The chief will never forgive himself for this,” muttered Gloria Quackenberry, brushing at her eyes with her knuckles. “As if – as if...” She stared at me defiantly. “Maybe he has come a cropper this time. Nobody ever batted a thousand per cent, but-but-they don’t come smarter than my boss.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said and then added cautiously, “You’ve been working for him a long time?”

“Five years! The happiest five years of my life...” She broke off, gave me a suspicious look, and then went on swiftly, “Yes, I’m in love with him, if that’s what you’re trying to smell out; but it isn’t his fault, see? And it’ll never come to anything, and that isn’t my fault.”

“I-er-”

“The boss has never been in love,” she declared with obvious pride in this accomplishment. “All women fall for him, and lotsa times he has to play up to them. Business of finding out things, you know, since our sex just will talk themselves into jams. But he despises them, the poor fools! He-he’s got ideals, and the woman who snares him will have to be right out of the top drawer.”

“Yes?” I murmured, thinking of Kathleen.

“He doesn’t despise me. He thinks I’m pretty regular, and that’s something.” She blinked hard. “That’s a heck of a lot! But he’d no more think of falling in love with me than I would with Joe E. Brown.”

“I-I’m sorry,” I faltered.

She blew her nose violently and rose to her feet. “At least, I get to risk my life and worse for him every so often, and I wouldn’t change jobs with anyone I ever heard of. Women are kittle cattle, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” I sighed.

“Heaven defend us!” She turned briskly toward the door. “Tell the boss,” she said to the policeman on guard in the lobby, “if he needs me for anything, to hang out the window and holler, and I’ll come running.”

She swung off down the street, her large capable hands thrust into the pockets of her checked coat, her wide red lips puckered into a noiseless whistle, her small scarlet hat cockily tilted over one eye, and I do not mind confessing to a lump in my throat which had nothing to do with those ugly bruises beginning to throb and turn purple on my neck.

It was, I recall, about four o’clock when I went upstairs to my room, an hour earlier than I usually retire to dress for dinner, but I had a fervent desire to crawl into a tub of very hot water and stay there practically forever, or at least until some of my aches and pains subsided.

Before I left the elevator I heard Sophie Scott weeping in her room and calling Cyril’s name over and over in a piteously broken voice that made my eyes sting. I hesitated a moment at her door, but, sorry as I felt for her, what could one say to comfort a woman whose husband has turned out to be that scum of all criminals, a white slaver, as well as a cowardly blackmailer and a thrice brutal murderer?

Shaking my head, I went slowly on down the hall, pursued by Sophie’s wailing cry. “Cyril! Cyril! How could you?”

I had just finished my bath and was slipping into my black lace dress when the telephone rang. It was Stephen, speaking from the lobby booth – or so he said – and he wanted to run up and talk to me for a few minutes.

“You know, the inspector is going to interview you in a short while, Adelaide.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“He craves to ask you a question or two, just routine, I fancy, but I’d admire to speak with you first.”

“All right,” I said.

I was sitting by the window when he came in, looking tired and dejected. He attempted his old impudent smile, but it did not quite come off.

“How’s the girl, Adelaide?” he asked. “Not too banged up, I hope.” He grinned. “Sorry about that haymaker I handed you, dearie. It was just one of those things.”

I motioned him to a chair opposite me. “I dare say I’ll forgive you,” I said. “It merely saved my life.”

I, too, had attempted my former tartness, but it was anything except convincing. Indeed, there was a suspicious dampness in my eyes and, I suspect, considerable affection as Stephen Lansing and I exchanged a sheepish grin. After all, I had liked the young scamp from the first, though I fought against it, and I had reason to conclude that he entertained much the same regard for me.

“In that case, Adelaide,” he said soberly, “maybe you’ll forget the old conscience and do me a favour?”

“If you mean there isn’t any point to be served now by telling the inspector about – about the Adairs, I thoroughly agree with you,” I announced emphatically.

Stephen did not say anything, and I gave him an accusing glance. “It would be entirely unnecessary, now that the criminal is known. Simply a-a gratuitous stirring of nasty waters and, more undeserved heartaches for that poor child.”