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

I, Adelaide Adams, spinster, was knitting in the lobby of the Richelieu the morning it all started. Not that I realized anything was starting. I am not a timorous woman. I understand I have occasionally been referred to by certain flippant members of the younger generation as ‘The Old Battle-Ax.’ Be that as it may, had I suspected the orgy of bloodshed upon which we were about to embark, I should then and there, in spite of my bulk and an arthritic knee, have taken shrieking to my heels.

However, it would have been difficult on that bright April morning to have found a spot which appeared more peaceful than the lobby of our small residential hotel. The Richelieu is grandiloquent in name only. It caters to quiet, respectable people, mostly permanent guests, many of whom, like myself, have occupied the same room or rooms in the hotel for years.

With one exception the staff, like the clientele, is of long standing.

Both the elevator and Clarence, the man who operates it at night and also acts as porter, are old models of their kind. Laura, the elderly maid on the two upper floors, had been at the Richelieu longer than I, as had Pinkney Dodge, the night clerk.

Sophie Scott, the proprietor, is herself crowding sixty, although after she married a man fifteen years her junior she tried to ape Sweet Sixteen, an experiment which was distinctly not a success.

Because of its staid ways people about town prior to April of this year had been in the facetious habit of alluding to the Richelieu as “The Old Ladies’ Home.” Needless to say, that was before the man was discovered, hung by his own suspenders to the chandelier in one of our best suites, with his throat cut from ear to ear.

Nevertheless, as I have intimated, there was nothing on this particular morning to indicate the reign of terror into which we were about to be precipitated. Coming events are supposed to cast their shadows before, yet I had no presentiment about the green spectacle case which was to play such a fateful part in the murders, and not until it was forever too late did I recognize the tragic significance of Polly Lawson’s pink jabot and the Anthony woman’s false eyelashes.

It seems inevitable now, but, as I sat there purling three and knitting two on the afghan which I intended to present to the orphans’ home of my church, there was nothing to warn me that it would serve instead as a shroud for a woman who was to die horribly at my feet. Nor at that time could any power on earth have convinced me that I should find myself late one terrible night, sans my dress and my false hair, dangling from the eaves of the Richelieu Hotel in pursuit of a triple slayer.

There is a parlour at the Richelieu, a depressing place on the second floor furnished in dreary black walnut and a bilious green carpet. The guests consistently prefer to sit in the lobby. It faces the only boulevard in our small Southern city, and, the entire front and one side being plate glass, it is uniformly light and cheerful.

The drugstore opens off to the left of the lobby as you emerge from the elevator, the Coffee Shop to the right. Two large divans, flanked by lounge chairs and a radio, face each other opposite the desk.

The staircase descends on the right of the elevator. On the other side is a telephone booth.

At the rear of the lobby a door opens into a long corridor which separates the kitchen on the inside of the building from the beauty shop on the outside. The corridor terminates at the employees’ entry off the alley. Between the plate-glass windows at the front is a revolving door, the main entrance to the hotel. One may well say the lobby is the heart of the Richelieu. At least, to one who sits as I have sat day in and day out for years in my favourite chair by the radio, it is possible to keep one’s finger on the pulse of everything that is going on.

To some people an interest in the behaviour of your fellow creatures is idle, if not morbid, curiosity. I have been called “that nosy old maid” because I am a close student of the human comedy. The fact remains, nonetheless, that very little happens in the Richelieu Hotel of which I do not sooner or later become aware, and I have a tenacious memory, especially for detail. Not much escapes my eyes and ears and nothing escapes my memory, though I may mislay it for a while.

Actually, it all began with my mislaying my green spectacle case. I seldom take the case out of my bedroom unless I am traveling, my glasses being the last thing I remove at night and the first I don of a morning. I had a distinct recollection of placing them as usual in the drawer of my bedside table the night before when I was ready to snap off my light. I remembered taking them out of the case that morning as soon as I washed my face. I thought I remembered replacing the case in its customary drawer. Nevertheless, there it was, lying between the cushions of the front divan in the lobby.

The shabby little man in the inconspicuous grey suit called it to my attention. “Isn’t this yours, Miss Adams?” he inquired.

As he spoke he reached down, extracted the case from between the cushions and held it out.

“Yes, Mr Reid,” I said in a startled voice, “it is.”

I have few vanities left, but my memory is one of them, and I felt not only confused but irritated because I could not recall bringing the spectacle case downstairs. That is why it did not occur to me till later to wonder how a man who was a transient guest in the hotel, and a recent one at that, should not only have known my name but should also have recognized one of my personal possessions which rarely, if ever, makes a public appearance.

It was not unusual that I knew more about him than I would have expected him to know of me. While the permanent people in the house have little to do with those who drift in and out of the hotel for a day or a week, I generally glance over the register every morning while I am waiting for the Coffee Shop to open. In this way I was aware that the small insignificant man with weak blue eyes and nondescript brown hair had arrived six days before and signed himself, in a thin wavering hand, James Reid, New Orleans.

“I can’t understand how the case came to be here,” I began in a vexed voice. “I could have vowed that I ...”

I was interrupted at this moment by an exclamation from the Adair girl. “Mother! You’ve dropped your handbag again, and – for the fifth time, isn’t it? – the contents are all over the place.”

As I recall, there were only the four of us in the lobby at the time, not counting Letty Jones, who worked behind the desk in the day. Because it was a stimulating spring morning, everyone else had gone out to enjoy the air. I remember thinking to myself that it was a shame for a pretty young girl to be cooped up indoors on such a morning with two middle-aged women, one with stiff joints and the other, to all appearances, a semi-invalid.

Not that until then I had had anything to do with the Adairs.

They had been in the hotel a little over a month at the time, and the old guard, as we call ourselves, do not let down the bars overnight.

We put newcomers through a stiff inspection before, if ever, we admit them to our closed circle. Those of us who have lived at the Richelieu for years have learned by bitter experience not to make up to every Tom, Dick and Harriet who takes a room there for a few weeks or even months. I have known people to wax quite indignant about the snubs with which their overtures were met. I remember one young woman who said it was easier to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than to be admitted among the elect at the Richelieu Hotel.

In fairness I must record that the Adairs had shown no disposition to force themselves upon anyone. They had, if anything, avoided other people. Yet from the first they struck me as a forlorn pair. Although the girl, in the manner of modern youth, had adopted a defiant pose, I was convinced she was far less self-sufficient than she pretended to be. About her good looks there can be no question. She had bright brown hair, the true chestnut colour, and clear brown eyes and really beautiful skin, nor did she indulge to excess in make-up, a point I found distinctly in her favour.

She also had a firm chin and a pleasant, even voice. To one brought up, as I was, to believe a lady is above everything else a person of refinement, she was a welcome change after the painted, boisterous, slangy young females one encounters everywhere nowadays with their cigarettes and their rolled hose and their flippant, high-pitched ejaculations, to say nothing of their complete lack of veneration for their elders.

I had only that morning compared Kathleen Adair favourably with young Polly Lawson as she raced through the lobby on her way out to some appointment or other. For a young woman who on both her maternal and paternal side inherited blue blood, Polly in my opinion was fast putting herself beyond the pale. I could have shaken her. It was only ten o’clock, but she had already begun on her daily round of highballs. I did not wonder that her aunt, Mary Lawson, was looking her age since Polly came to live with her. I had made up my mind at the first opportunity to tell Mary a thing or two which I believed she should know about her niece, though it has not been my experience that one is better liked for doing one’s duty in such cases.

At any rate, Polly had disposed me to look kindly on the Adair girl. If she smoked or drank, she did so in the privacy of her room.

Just as she did not cross her legs in public and ogle men young or old. I had myself seen her put several in their places when they tried to scrape her acquaintance. Nor could one overlook her devotion to her mother, who impressed me as a spineless woman, with her plaintive voice and her frail, ineffectual hands and her general attitude of being a little foggy about everything.

It seemed to me there was no excuse for any adult to be quite so helpless, but her daughter watched over her as if she were her lone chick. If she lost patience, it was not apparent. Even now, when for the fourth or fifth time that morning Mrs Adair had allowed her overloaded handbag to slide off her knees onto the tiled floor, the girl did not scold. She was laughing as she stooped to recover the scattered contents.

“Darling,” she said, “I think I’ll get a chain and fasten it to your wrist.”

Mrs Adair’s thin white hands fluttered weakly. “I do hope the mirror isn’t broken. Oh dear, I don’t believe I could bear it if we were to have seven more years of bad luck.”

“The mirror’s all right,” said the girl quickly, rising to her feet.

She thrust something shiny into the pocket of her woolly brown skirt and glanced at me with a strange, almost desperate appeal in her eyes. I said nothing, but I thought again that the mother was a peculiarly feckless person not to see the glittering fragment of shattered glass beside her foot. She did not see it, however, for her small pale face lighted with relief.

“It’s silly to be superstitious,” she said with a faint smile, “only I never knew a broken mirror not to bring trouble, black trouble.”

To my surprise the girl shivered. I expect old Laura, the maid on my floor, to grow pale if a black cat crosses her path. Clarence, the night-elevator man, is convinced if a bat gets into the house someone will die within twelve hours. I myself have a prejudice against laying a hat on a bed, and Kathleen Adair’s anaemic little mother looked as though she might be a bundle of inhibitions and outmoded superstitions. The girl, on the other hand, belonged to a generation that scoffs at such things.

I must have been staring at her fixedly, for she flushed clear down inside her lacy knit blouse and gave me a hostile glance from her narrowed brown eyes. “A broken mirror means nothing,” she said sharply, although her voice trembled.

I shrugged my shoulders. Again I thought the girl was far more vulnerable than she wanted to appear. It was certain she possessed the brains of the family. Her mother most likely had once been a pretty woman, but I did not believe she had ever had a great deal of practical sense. I do not care for clinging vines or for wilted blondes, however pathetic. Something of my sentiment must have been reflected in my face, for the Adair girl for the second time gave me a hostile look.

“Everybody can’t be strong minded,” she said hotly, “and not afraid of anything. Some people are born defenceless, but that doesn’t make them less lovable.”

She was all but scowling at me, and for a moment she reminded me of someone. It gave me a pang, though I could not to save me place the resemblance. Then she smiled ruefully and the teasing likeness was gone and with it the curious cramp in my heart.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to rant.”

“Whatever became of the man who discovered your spectacle case, Miss Adams?” asked Mrs Adair in her soft blurred voice. “It was a spectacle case, wasn’t it? And he did call you Miss Adams?” It had not occurred to me till then that the small insignificant man in grey had faded out of the picture as unobtrusively as he had melted into it. I could not recall exactly when he had joined us. I had no idea at what time he walked away.

“Yes,” I said none too cordially, “I am Miss Adams, and it is a spectacle case, although it seems to have powers I didn’t suspect. I mean, I never knew it could go up and down stairs of its own accord.”

The girl smiled at me without a trace of her former antagonism.