Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (14 page)

“It’s nothing to you,” I muttered angrily, but I knew, in spite of everything, that I was beginning to have a sneaking fondness for the dashing young Mr Lansing.

I had even decided that a large part of his flippancy was a pose and, like a matchmaking old fool, I had fancied that the only woman he was seriously interested in at the Richelieu was the Adair girl.

Now, however, I made up my mind that when it came to a choice of playmates Stephen’s only requirement was the more the merrier.

“Very likely Kathleen’s indifference piques him,” I told myself.

“He plainly is not used to being held at arm’s length. No doubt his only object in pursuing her is to keep up his batting average.”

Be that as it may, I was sure that to her he stood for more than that, much more, poor child. I sighed again. It had occurred to me, as to the inspector, that Stephen Lansing was by no means absolved from suspicion. There were a number of questions concerning that young man which bothered me.

What had Stephen Lansing forgotten and come back after the night James Reid was killed? Stephen’s room was on the floor below, yet he had been the first by several minutes to reach me after I ran shrieking into the corridor. Who, if not he, had telephoned to James Reid from the Sally Ray Beauty Shop the afternoon before the man was murdered? How had Stephen Lansing happened to be almost completely dressed at three o’clock that morning, the same morning on which two rooms in the hotel had been visited by a mysterious intruder? And why had he been eager to destroy any clues which the intruder might have left upon the fire escape? I winced.

Mention of the fire escape brought me up against that which to me was the most heart breaking question of all. What had Kathleen Adair been doing on the fire-escape landing outside the room formerly occupied by James Reid? That she had been there I could not get away from. I was prepared to admit that my green spectacle case appeared, on one occasion, to have taken a promenade of its own accord, but I did not for a minute believe that my freshly washed princess slip had repeated the feat.

Kathleen had lied when she said she dropped the black and gold brooch while leaning out her window to observe the sunset. I could not bring myself to believe that Laurie’s daughter was that damned soul who had stood beside my bed the night before. Nevertheless, by the evidence of the brooch, she had been on the fifth floor landing of the fire escape at some time or other, of that I was convinced. And she was in trouble, trouble which had made her run away from me that day at noon in an anguish of despair.

As I was rising from the table I came face to face with Sophie Scott, bustling into the dining room for her own dinner, a distressed pucker between her eyebrows which, since her marriage, she had taken to dyeing, with hideous results, need I add? As I have said, Sophie and I had not been on the friendliest terms after Cyril’s advent into her life, but we had been once, and the look she threw me at this time was so hostile as to give me a decided turn.

“I do think, Adelaide, considering the stew we are in already, you might be more considerate than to hurt poor dear Cyril’s feelings for no reason at all,” she accused me with unconcealed bitterness.

“Poor dear Cyril shouldn’t wear his feelings stuck out like a sore thumb,” I defended myself tartly.

In spite of myself, however, I was touched to see that Sophie’s eyes had filled with tears. “I realize you’ve always been prejudiced against him, Adelaide, simply because you don’t understand Cyril. Poor boy, he’s had such a thwarted life. Never till he married me did he know what peace and tenderness and security can mean.”

“I don’t doubt that,” I snapped and then, staring at her curiously, I asked, “Just how much do you really know, if anything, about Cyril’s past, Sophie?”

“Why I-I know everything, of course!” she cried indignantly. “I cannot imagine why you persist in trying to make out, Adelaide, that Cyril is of an evasive disposition. I’m sure he never attempts to conceal the facts about himself.”

“Doesn’t he?” I inquired grimly, thinking I had never known a person who could talk faster and say less about his past than could Cyril Fancher.

Putting her nose in the air, Sophie barged away toward the kitchen. I stared after her thoughtfully. There were several things which puzzled me about Sophie and her husband. What had he been doing on the fourth floor the preceding night almost immediately before I discovered James Reid’s lifeless body, and was it Sophie who hired the private detective in the first place? Not for a minute did I believe she was satisfied, or ever had been, with the vague account which Cyril Fancher gave of himself.

What elderly wife with a younger husband would be? She had said that never till he married her had Cyril known peace and security. How much were they worth to him, I wondered, a chill playing up and down my spine. Was it Cyril Fancher’s guilty secret for which James Reid and Lottie Mosby had paid so terrible a price?

Apparently Stephen had not lingered long with that brazen seductress, the Anthony woman, for when I came into the lobby he was just stepping out of the elevator and he had a slender long stemmed rosebud in his hand.

“How lovely!” cried little Mrs Adair, her wan face lighting with pleasure. “Such an exquisite pink!”

He paused beside the divan on which she was sitting and, rather self-consciously for him, held out the rose. “Wouldn’t you like it?” he asked.

“Oh, thank you,” she whispered with a radiant smile.

The girl made a swift passionate gesture of protest. “Don’t take it!” she cried.

Stephen Lansing’s eyes dwelt on her with strange intensity. “Why not?” he asked softly. “Your mother loves pretty things.”

She shrank back but she did not speak. I think, poor child, she was unable to force her bloodless lips apart.

“Yes,” said little Mrs Adair, “I love anything colourful.”

She suddenly tucked the rose above the coil of bright bronze hair on her daughter’s neck.

“There!” she said. “It looks perfectly beautiful.”

I thought the girl was going to reach up and tear the flowers to pieces and I did not doubt she yearned to fling them into Stephen Lansing’s face. But little Mrs Adair was beaming like a pleased child over her achievement, and slowly, by a tremendous effort, Kathleen Adair controlled herself.

“Doesn’t it look sweet in Kathleen’s hair, Mr Lansing?” asked her mother naively.

His eyes met Kathleen’s, and it seemed to me hers were frantic with dismay.

“Yes,” said Stephen Lansing, turning a little white, “the rose is lovely in Kathleen’s hair.”

His voice made a caress of her name, but, although her lips quivered, her expression did not soften, and for the second time I saw Kathleen Adair look at a man as though she would, if she could, have slain him with a glance.

“I told you, Miss Adams,” murmured little Mrs Adair abruptly, “that there would be another death.”

Tearing my gaze with an effort from Kathleen’s ravaged face, I turned with a little shiver to the older woman.

“Thank God, we don’t have that to look forward to any longer,” I snapped.

Under my very eyes her small pale face grew thinner and more wasted. “Oh, but it isn’t ended,” she said. “Death is still all about us.”

I tried to say “Nonsense!” only I could not get the word out, and in the breathless silence I heard Kathleen Adair whisper in a furious voice to Stephen Lansing, “If you betray us I’ll make you pay if I have to follow you to the ends of the earth and back!”

It was Howard who a few minutes later brought us the latest bad news. “The inspector wants to see all of us in the parlour at eight fifteen,” he announced with a grimace.

“What now?” I groaned.

Behind me little Mrs Adair murmured, “Oh dear!” and Polly Lawson glanced quickly at Mary and went quite white. The Anthony woman laughed unpleasantly.

“Thank the Lord, I have nothing to fear,” she said with a significant glance at the faces around her on which chagrin or possibly a more poignant emotion was indelibly stamped.

“I notice the inspector has not omitted you from the list as yet,” I pointed out.

She grinned at me. “The inspector likes to look upon a good looking woman, Miss Adams. Exasperating as it must seem to you, most men do.”

I shrugged my shoulders. It had struck me that Inspector Bunyan had betrayed a little difficulty in tearing his eyes from Hilda Anthony’s lush curves. Nevertheless, there were several questions about the lady which interested me and which I imagined the inspector had not overlooked. Why should she have lingered on and on at the Richelieu after she secured her divorce the year before? Admittedly a gold digger, neither pure nor simple, what had caused her to withdraw herself from circulation in a place which for her purpose appeared to be peculiarly arid? And why had Mr James Reid been staring at her from the foot of the staircase less than an hour before he was killed?

Ella Trotter nudged me in the ribs. “I wouldn’t put murder or anything else past that brazen hussy,” she remarked in a sibilant whisper.

I nodded wearily. If it were true that one of us was a double murderer, nothing would have comforted me more than to have the guilt pinned on the Anthony woman, only I had a presentiment even then that she was too careful of her own skin ever to thrust her beautiful neck into the hangman’s noose.

Stephen must have read my thoughts, for he grinned at me wryly and whispered, “It would be nice, wouldn’t it, Adelaide, if you could shove it all off onto the lady known as Lou.”

I sniffed. “Your idea and mine of a lady differ.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he remarked airily. “Believe it or not, I have a few inhibitions myself, especially about women.”

I did not deign to reply. It was then, I recall, a few minutes before eight and, as the climax to an already sad and depressing day, it had begun to rain, a chill drizzle, half mist, which drifted into the house in spite of closed doors and windows. It promptly started the little tickle in my bronchial tubes which in damp weather, unless checked, gives me an annoying cough.

When I cleared my throat the second time, Ella Trotter frowned at me anxiously. “If you don’t want to come down with another crop of croup, Adelaide, you’d better get your fascinator,” she said.

Stephen laughed. “I didn’t know there was a female extant who still used those gimcracks.”

“Young man,” I remarked grimly, “there are many things which you do not and probably never will know.”

“True, how true, Adelaide!” he murmured with a rueful smile.

At almost precisely that same hour the night before I had gone to my room to stumble upon the body of a murdered man. Though not a fanciful person, I must confess that it gave me no little relief at this time to discover, when I rounded the corner from the elevator, that the lights were burning quite properly in both corridors on the fifth floor, although somebody had left the door open which led out upon the fire escape and the hall was full of fog.

I slammed it to and bolted it. “The employees in this hotel have grown more slipshod every day since Tom Scott died,” I muttered to myself, coughing as I fitted my key to the lock.

The atmosphere inside 511 felt equally thick, and when I opened the door the draft whipped the lank lace curtains at the nearer window out and in. I went over angrily and jerked the sash down. It was then, with a prickle at the base of my scalp, I realized that the other window, the one on the fire escape, was up a foot from the ledge.

Now I had been short with Inspector Bunyan early that morning when he suggested that I keep that particular window locked and I had sniffed audibly when a little later the policeman Sweeney came and attended to the matter himself at the inspector’s instigation.

Nevertheless, I had never intended to spend another minute in that room without being quite positive that the approach via the fire escape was securely closed off.

It had been the first thing I looked to before I took my bath that afternoon, the last I glanced back at as I was starting down to dinner. On both occasions the lock on the window had been firmly in place and latched. However, the window was now undeniably open. It was with what I regard as pardonable uneasiness that I approached it and slammed it down. Not, I freely admit, until the bolt was fastened and the shade lowered did I recover from a deplorable weakness in the region of my knees.

“Apparently locks and bolts have come to mean nothing in this house,” I told myself bitterly.

My crocheted shawl was in the closet. As Stephen Lansing had said, ‘fascinators’ went out of style many years ago, but one of the compensations of being past fifty is the privilege of being comfortable, regardless of style, and I have never found any better protection for a sensitive throat than my lavender throw. Nor is it too unbecoming with iron-grey hair and a florid skin, as I remember thinking after a cursory examination of the mirror.

Unlike many women, I have never spent a lot of time in front of a looking glass. As a rule I am more often disconcerted than pleased with such a survey. This night was no exception. I was in the very act of turning hastily away when I spied the slip of paper tucked in at one side of the mirror frame.

It was on plain brown wrapping paper, such as might have been torn off any bundle. No attempt had been made to even the ragged edges, the piece being roughly the size of an ordinary sheet of notepaper. In the upper left-hand corner there was a crude drawing, done with the stub end of a cheap hard pencil. The figure it represented might have been scrawled on somebody’s outhouse or on the walls of a padded cell. It was so vulgar as to make me feel a little nauseated.

Beneath it, printed by the same stubby pencil, were these words: “Unless you want the police to hear all about the Adair wench and her mama, place one thousand dollars in cash in the water pitcher and leave it on the fire escape landing tonight at one o’clock.”

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring from that abominable thing in my hand to the aluminium ice-water pitcher with which each room in the Richelieu is equipped. Until that moment nothing could have convinced me that I should ever, under any circumstances, pay tribute to that most cowardly form of criminal known as the blackmailer.