A Key to the Suite (18 page)

He snapped his cigarette out into the night and went back into the room, half expecting her to have gone into the bathroom, but she was as he had left her, tumbled and spread diagonally across the foot of the bed she had been in when he had come into the room, her head over the edge. He could just make her out in the small light that filtered into the room.

He stood near the foot of the bed and said, “You’re not that worn out, cutie.”

He reached down to touch her in a hearty, familiar, casual way, put his hand against flesh, snatched it away, backed slowly
until his shoulders touched the wall. He stood there breathing through jaws held wide.

After a long time he found the energy to go draw the draperies and turn a single floor lamp on and look at her. “But I didn’t hit you that hard!” he whispered. “You shouldn’t have got loose and run for the door. You shouldn’t have done that, damn you!”

He wanted a drink desperately, and at the same time was glad there was no liquor in the room, because he knew he was going to have to start thinking very soon, thinking with great care and caution. Because now, unless he was very careful, everything could go whirling down the drain. He wanted to cover the body so he could stop looking at it, but he knew he should take no meaningless action. It was like being in a pit with a poisonous snake. If you moved perfectly, you were home free. If you did the smallest thing wrong, you were dead.

He went into the bathroom, turned on the cold white blaze of fluorescence, filled the basin with cold water and sloshed his face and head, snorting and snuffling. As he dried himself, he remembered the night bolt on the room door and fixed it.

After making certain there was no gap in the closure of the draperies, he turned on every light in the room. He paced back and forth, glancing at the body, accustoming himself to it, because he knew he would have to touch it sooner or later. He hummed to himself. He beat his fist into his palm. He cheered himself by thinking, I have been in a hundred jams. I have gotten out of every one. I can get out of this one.

He sat on the other bed, facing her, and her upside-down face was close enough to touch, her eyes partially open. He got up quickly and checked the room for her possessions, found clothes, purse, swimsuit, bathing cap.

The big limiting factor was how much Floyd Hubbard might remember. There was too good a chance he would remember giving the room key to Daniels. That seemed to eliminate the chance of leaving her just as she was, or dressing her and dumping her over the edge of the terrace railing.

He hit himself over the ear with his clenched fist, shook his head violently, and went over it again. Any look of murder would result in a more careful investigation than he could stand. There was a subtle, sickening exaggeration to the angle of her head. The backhand blow had snapped her neck just before he had caught her up and tumbled her back onto the foot of the bed. There was a faint blue bruise on the delicate line of her jaw.

He looked at his upper arm, near his shoulder, at the three deep parallel gouges her nails had made as she had gotten away from him the second time. They could check the meat and blood under her nails, type it.

The plan was vague at first, but as he went over it in his mind it became ever more specific. The single crucial factor was the night bolt and chain. He turned all the lights off and went out onto the terrace again. The vertical sawtooth construction made it impossible to reach the terraces to the right or the left. When he was certain he was not being watched by anyone, he stepped over the railing, stood on a narrow edge of concrete, crouched and, holding onto the railing, looked down onto the terrace directly below. The room was dark. It would be a simple matter to lower himself, hang from the edge on which he stood, swing in and drop onto the terrace below. He had always been a good athlete. He trusted his body to perform as he wanted it to, without fear or hesitation. It was unlikely that the terrace door below would be locked on the inside. It could be forced if it was. And if the room was empty, or if people were asleep there,
in either case he would go quickly and quietly through the room and out into the seventh floor corridor.

He went back into 847 and turned the lights back on. He wiped his hands on his thighs several times before he could force himself to touch the small body, so eerily still, so oddly flattened. Once he had begun, he worked steadily and quietly.

He did not know how long it took. When it was done, he tried to look at the scene the way a policeman might. They would have had to use nippers on the night chain. They would find both beds neatly made, her clothing laid out on one of them. They would find one lamp on in the bedroom, and the room key on the desk. They would hear the sound of the shower, and when they opened the bathroom door they would find her sprawled halfway out of the shower, the glass shower door open. She would have her swim cap on, and she would be belly down across the raised sill of the shower stall, the damp cake of soap inches from her outstretched hand. (And they would not guess how he had gagged as he had cleaned the nails of that outstretched hand.)

Because they would have to cut the chain to get in, they would not be suspicious. And he knew he could not take the risk of leaving by way of the room door. He had not been seen entering, he knew.

He dressed quickly, put one shoe in each side pocket of his jacket, took a long, slow look around, then went through the orange-yellow draperies and out onto the terrace and eased the glass door shut behind him. He was glad to see that very little light came through the draperies—not enough to silhouette him in any dangerous fashion.

Once again he looked for a long time in all possible directions. He could not see down into the shadows of the pool area. Somebody could be down there, staring up at the sky. It was a risk he would have to take, a minor one compared to all the others.

When he was quite ready, he rehearsed in his mind the moves he would make. He straddled the railing, found the small edge with his stocking foot, swung the other leg over and crouched as before. The terrace wall was pierced with ornamental holes which provided safe, sturdy hand-holds. When his hands were secure, fingers locked on the inner edge of two of the lower holes, he lowered himself carefully until he was extended at full length, his legs dangling. It brought his eyes below the level of the cantilevered slab which formed the deck of his own terrace, the one he was leaving. The railing of the terrace below was about a foot below his toes. He decided that rather than risk the noise of swinging in and dropping, he would be able to reach the railing with his toes if he took a second hand-hold on the narrow edge on which he had previously braced his feet. He brought his left hand down first, clamping his fingertips on the edge, then slowly transferred his weight to his left arm. The strain on his fingertips of his left hand was great, but he knew he could endure it for the small part of a second it would take to slide his right hand down to the same small edge, and then his toes would reach the lower railing.

In the instant he let go with his right hand, he felt the small edge crumbling under the fingers of his left hand, powdering away. He spasmed his body inward, dropped the few remaining inches and landed on the railing, in precarious balance for one moment of triumph and gladness, and then he was tilting back, flailing his arms, barking the skin off his knuckles on the cement
overhead. As he knew he was going, he tried to squat and catch the edge of the railing he was on, but all he was able to do was flick his fingertips against the outer edge of it. He went down, and all the lights were going around him in a huge slow wheeling. He filled his lungs with the moist air that was rushing by his face and gave a great despairing roar which ended when the small of his back smashed the ornamental iron fence which separated the pool area from one of the service areas. A woman began a metronomic screaming, becoming perceptibly more hoarse with each earnest effort.

Alan Amory, the Public Relations Director of the Sultana Hotel, walked behind the bar of the Hideaway Club to make a drink for fat Captain Brewhane of Homicide, the last arrival. It was after midnight. All lights were on in the office suite, all draperies closed. Amory had the feeling it was going rather well, better than he had expected at first. There was a special protocol about these matters whenever a major hotel was involved, particularly in a resort area. The problems were delicate. You had to be particularly careful about the way things were said. Any hint of challenge had to be avoided at all costs.

One small victory had been gained already. He had stalled the members of the working press beyond the final moment for any possible inclusion in the morning papers. So, unless it turned out truly gaudy, there would be a patina of staleness which would limit coverage in the afternoon papers tomorrow.

He carried the drink back toward the quiet mumbling of male conversations at the big table in the rear of the small club room. When he put the drink in front of Brewhane, they all looked up at him. They wore the mild little smiles of poker
players: Brewhane, Detective Lieutenant Al Farrier, Rick DiLarra—the convention director for the Sultana, Detective-Sergeant Milton Manning, Rice Emper, legal counsel for the hotel and Peter Lipe, an assistant state’s attorney.

Amory said, “If you gentlemen will excuse me a moment, the people in my office could be getting impatient. I don’t want them leaving. The reporters are camped out in the shrubbery.”

“Who have you got?” Brewhane demanded.

“A Mr. Frick. He’s the one who …”

“Friend of mine,” Al Farrier interrupted. “Bill, he’s the one called me early about helping him out with the drunk who fell into the courtyard.”

“Too bad you couldn’t have come around earlier,” Brewhane said.

“When I got here at ten we couldn’t find him. Fred Frick and I looked every place for the guy.”

“Who else?” Brewhane asked.

“A Mr. Mulaney, the dead man’s employer. Mr. Hubbard, who has the room where the woman’s body was found. And a Mrs. Hugh Constanto, a … friend of Mr. Hubbard.”

“Go tell them I want them to stay put, and come right back, Amory,” Brewhane directed.

Amory went to his office. Frick and Mulaney sat on a leather couch talking in low tones. Hubbard sat on a straight chair, leaning on his knees, his head lowered. Honey Constanto sat in a deep leather chair, looking half asleep.

“You’ll have to stay around a little while longer,” Amory said. “I’m sorry.”

Frick said, “Sure.” Mulaney nodded. The other two gave no word or gesture.

Amory went back to the club room and joined the group at the table. He spoke before anyone could speak to him, taking that chance to make a point in a rather oblique way. “Thank God we were able to get Daniels’ body out as quietly as we did. I don’t think there’s fifteen guests in the hotel who have any inkling anything like that happened. The girl was less of a problem, of course. We’ve had deaths in rooms before. We have a standard operating procedure for that, and we got the usual fine cooperation from the medical examiner, from the ambulance people and from your men, Captain.”

Brewhane said, impatiently, “Let’s recap this thing and find out which way we’re going. Catch me up if I’m wrong on the broad picture, Al. You were here hunting for that guy when he squashed himself in the courtyard. Milt, here, was with you. Both of you off duty, doing a favor for a friend. So while the body was being hustled away so it could be examined down at the police morgue, you started trying to find out where it fell from. In that process, you came across that room with the door chained and no answer. And that’s where you found the body of the Barlund woman.”

Rice Emper interrupted smoothly, saying, “But I think we should be careful not to jump to the conclusion that Daniels fell or jumped from the terrace of 847. There were convention parties going on in at least a dozen rooms on the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth floors overlooking the area where Daniels landed. We know he was so recklessly drunk that Mr. Frick asked his old friend here, Al Farrier, to come and help out, for Daniels’ own good. All of those rooms have terraces. He could have gone out on any one of them, feeling sick and dizzy …”

The young assistant state’s attorney, Peter Lipe, cleared his
throat and said, “I suppose 847 could be checked carefully for … for any clue that that’s where Daniels was. Fingerprints or something like that.”

Brewhane glared at him. “When and if you get a file on this, Lipe, then you complain if you don’t like it. But don’t tell me how to make it up.”

“But if people were looking for Daniels and couldn’t find him …”

Brewhane leaned back in his chair, ignoring Lipe. With his eyes half shut he said, “I suppose if we didn’t have too much to do, and we weren’t short of men and time, we could make a hell of a lot of fuss about this. We know Daniels was in 847 sometime during the evening.… Correction—we know he
could
have been in 847, because somebody told you, Al, they had given him the key.”

“Hubbard told me about ten times. He was shook,” Al said.

“But,” Brewhane continued, “we could rush around trying to add up two and two and get nine and create a hell of a lot of stir and confusion and find out in the end we just didn’t have enough to go on, and all we would succeed in doing is hurting a lot of people for no good reason. We could jump too fast at little things like Daniels not wearing his shoes, and the fresh gouges on his shoulder, and the woman’s shower cap being on backwards, and come up with some cute theory about Daniels killing her and making it look like a shower-bath accident, and then trying to leave by way of the terrace and slipping.” He turned to give Amory a prolonged, sleepy stare. “And even though we might get no place at all checking all that out, Amory, we might have to go through the motions if somebody agitates us to keep looking.”

Amory glanced sidelong at Emper, and knew this was the
crucial moment. He tried to keep his tension hidden. “Mr. Daniels was a Chicago sales executive, Captain. All his friends were disturbed about his heavy drinking. Mr. Mulaney told me that Mrs. Daniels was also very upset about it. By the way, Mr. Mulaney phoned her from my office long distance and broke the terrible news to her. He said she seemed stunned, but at the same time she acted as if she’d expected something like this to happen. And certainly Mr. Daniels’ employers are not going to want to pursue this any further. I’m sure the company would be most happy to have it all handled as quietly as possible. Mr. Frick suddenly remembered Daniels complaining about feeling dizzy and nauseated earlier in the evening. I’ve always felt those terrace railings were a little too low, actually.”