Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (18 page)

It was, as near as I can estimate, a few minutes of two when I heard the faint metallic click on the landing. Aha, I told myself, the villain approaches. In my excitement I totally forgot to be afraid – explain that if you can. Nothing at the moment mattered to me except the thrill of the chase. In fact, only my determination not to frighten my game away at the last moment enabled me during the next few minutes to keep my head down.

As eager as a stove-up old fire horse, I crouched there, waiting for the signal to pounce. To this day I do not know if I expected my proposed victim to drop dead at sight of me or what. There are times even yet when I become slightly hysterical at the thought of what would have happened had I actually confronted that distraught and frantic creature for whom I lay in wait. But there is a destiny which watches over children and idiots, for I did not confront him.

When next I raised my head the water pitcher was gone.

I could not and would not believe it. I was convinced my senses or the ghostly grey fog which swirled by in tatters on the shoulders of the wind was playing me tricks. There was one terrible moment when I wondered if it was my brain which was going to pieces under the strain, when I wondered if perhaps the inspector and Stephen Lansing were right in harping upon the strange coincidence with which from the first I had seemed to be the focal point for the murders at the Hotel Richelieu. I even wondered if one who was losing her mind might in a temporary fit of madness fling a woman out a window and cut a man’s throat without, at her lucid intervals, recalling a single one of her horrible actions.

However, after a while I threw off the hobgoblins and rose creakily to my feet. The water pitcher was gone. How and where, I had no idea, but my common sense came to my rescue in what till then had been the most desperate minute of my life. I had set the trap and a human rat had filched the bait from under my very teeth, but there was nothing weird or supernatural about the episode. I had merely been outwitted by someone far more cunning than I.

For the first time it dawned upon me how clever the blackmailer had been in his choice of the aluminium water pitcher as a silent partner in his nefarious business. Not only were they easily come by and practically unidentifiable, being a part of the equipment of every room in the hotel, but they each had a narrow rigid handle.

There was no other way to explain the metallic click and the way in which the pitcher had apparently taken wings and floated itself away.

“He has a fishing tool of some kind,” I told myself bitterly, “or some sort of long rod with a hook on the end. He simply hooks the handle of the pitcher and draws it up or down or out or in, as the case may be.”

My chagrin at the way I had been outwitted was equalled only by my, I contend, quite natural desire to get my own back. The loss of my thousand dollars was the least smart to my pride. Otherwise, my knees being what they are, the last thing I should ever have attempted was to clamber through my window and out upon the fire escape. I had some notion, I think, of peeping under drawn shades upon a malignant creature, gloatingly removing my greenbacks from my favourite silk handkerchief, which I had never intended for a cravenly blackmailer.

I still insist, regardless of Ella Trotter’s gibes on the subject, that I should have succeeded in wriggling my rather corpulent body through the opening without too much difficulty. As I have bitterly pointed out, I must indeed have been at least halfway through for my writhing’s to have discharged the revolver in my pocket.

Yes, it went off, as empty guns have a trick of doing at the most inopportune times. Went off with the most deafening explosion and an acrid puff of gunpowder, which promptly flew up my nostrils like a cloud of brimstone. Naturally I sneezed, went into a violent fit of coughing, and completely lost my balance.

That is why when Stephen Lansing again bounded up the fire escape in his brocaded dressing gown it was to discover me hanging out my window by my knees, in the manner of the famous three toed sloth, upside down, with tears streaming down my cheeks as I clutched the rungs of the fire escape and indulged in a series of asthmatic wheezes, while in the pocket of my purple bathrobe a small fire blazed merrily up.

“Good God, Miss Adelaide, make up your mind!” he gasped. “Are you trying to hang yourself? Or shoot yourself? Or burn yourself up?”

“At-choo! Glug!” was the only response to which I was equal at the moment.

He groaned. “One might know, Adelaide, you’d be no sissy even at suicide.”

“Young man,” I spluttered weakly, “I only hope I haven’t killed anyone else – Atchoo!”

He stared at me with a convulsed look on his face, and I explained crossly, “It was that dratted gun in my pocket. It went – atchoo! – it went off for no good reason.”

At this point, with some boosting on Stephen’s part, I managed to work my way back into the room, where he joined me, continuing to stare at me very strangely while he beat out the blaze in my pocket which the gun had set off, and we both, as if by mutual consent, ignored the furious banging on the door which was the policeman Sweeney, trying to effect an entrance with, I admit, justifiable excitement.

“Open up, or I’ll shoot the lock!” he thundered at last in what was unmistakably an ultimatum.

Giving me a rueful glance, Stephen Lansing shrugged his shoulders, crossed the room, noiselessly turned the key, and flung the door open so suddenly Sweeney all but fell in upon his prominent beak.

“What the...” he snarled, wildly swinging an enormous service revolver in all directions as if he were shadowboxing a whole army of criminals.

“You two again!” he exclaimed, stopping short and staring from one to the other of us with a sour expression. “Where’s the corpse?”

“I regret to disappoint you, but no gore has been shed, if one accepts the feathers of the old grey goose,” remarked Stephen in his suavest manner.

“Feathers!” repeated Officer Sweeney in an exasperated voice.

“Whatcha giving me?”

“Feathers, feathers, everywhere, and not a lulu bird in sight,” murmured Stephen, airily pursing his lips and waving a couple of pale grey feathers into Sweeney’s outraged face.

It was then I perceived that the bullet from my gun had found sanctuary in one of the pillows on the bed, as evidenced by a neat blackened hole in the starched slip.

“There is only one hole,” Stephen pointed out softly. “The-er your shot, Adelaide, seems to have buried itself in down.”

“Thank providence!” I cried devoutly.

Officer Sweeney glared at me. “And what might you have been doing firing a shot at all?” he demanded.

“Well,” I said tartly, “I might have been practicing for a beauty contest.”

Patrolman Sweeney flung me an embittered glance. “Only you wasn’t,” he snapped.

“No,” I admitted wearily, “I wasn’t.”

“I guess you might just as well save it for the inspector,” said Sweeney. “Only I warn you, after routing him out of bed for the second night in succession you two had better make it good.”

To say that I experienced no enthusiasm at the prospect of presenting the inspector with an explanation for my, to say the least, peculiar actions on this occasion presents an entirely inadequate picture of the way I cudgelled my brain during that uncomfortable half-hour while Stephen and I waited for the inspector’s arrival.

The turmoil had aroused everybody in the hotel, but Sweeney ordered the others back to their rooms.

Stephen and me he marched downstairs to the lobby, practically by an ear. There he left us in charge of two gawky and extremely nervous young policemen who were, I gathered, the cubs of the force. I think Sweeney himself wanted an unobstructed opportunity to search my room. I believe he expected to find no less than two murdered bodies piled up in my closet, if not under the bed.

Before he left us I heard him mutter to one of the fledgling cops, “If you want my opinion, she’s a werewolf, and he” – indicating Stephen – “is her pet pup.”

“Gosh!” breathed the young policeman, his knees betraying a tendency to clash together like castanets.

“I never had such a shock, Miss Adelaide,” said Pinky from behind the desk. “As soon as I heard the shot I was certain somebody else had been murdered, and when Clarence squalled down the elevator shaft that the disturbance was in your room I nearly fainted right on my feet.”

I took a long breath. “As it happens, the fuss has all been for nothing, absolutely nothing, Pinky. I took my revolver to bed with me, for a precaution, as I often do,” I explained mendaciously, “and in some manner I managed in my sleep to-er-discharge a bullet into one of my pillows.”

That was the story which I repeated firmly and without embellishment to the inspector after he came, not, I think, that he believed it for a second. However, he was unable to shake my testimony.

I was a little shocked at the facility which I had developed for telling the most abandoned lies without a twinge of conscience, a talent which had lain dormant in my make-up for fifty-odd years, no matter what Ella Trotter has to say on the topic.

“And you, Mr Lansing,” murmured the inspector with a jaundiced gleam in his eye, “just how did you happen to appear once more with such remarkable ease and celerity in Miss Adams’ room? Passing, it would seem, right through locked doors and windows, to say nothing of a two-hundred-pound policeman.”

“Just like the daring young man on the flying trapeze, tra la,” murmured Stephen impudently.

The inspector’s face turned faintly purple.

“I forgot to mention, Inspector Bunyan,” I interposed hastily, “that I had left the window on the fire escape open.”

“Contrary to my recommendation?”

“I’m afraid so,” I admitted feebly.

“Either you are a phenomenally fearless woman, Miss Adams,” said Inspector Bunyan ominously, “or you have sufficient reasons of your own for feeling immune to the murderous attack of the dangerous criminal now at large in the Richelieu Hotel.”

I shivered. “I -er-am a fatalist, Inspector,” I murmured, more or less at random. “You know, what is to be, will be, and all that kind of thing.”

“Believe it or not,” added Stephen Lansing solemnly.

The inspector favoured us with what to me was a distinctly disconcerting look. “And once more, Mr Lansing, when Miss Adams trumpeted her appeal for help, you were fully attired, at two o’clock and past of a black and rainy night,” he said with what I can only describe as a snort.

Stephen smiled brightly. “I was playing solitaire in my room, Inspector, on the third floor. I think I have remarked to you before that I am a bit of a night owl.”

“Quite so,” murmured the inspector. “Only it had slipped my mind till now that the owl, although a synonym for benignant wisdom in literary circles, is actually a bird of prey which prefers to do its hunting – and killing – at night.”

Stephen grinned. “Have it your own way, Inspector.”

Apparently satisfied that he had got all he was going to get out of us, the inspector let us go at last, taking the precaution, however, to send the two embryo policemen up in the elevator with us, presumably to rob us of an opportunity for private conversation.

The inspector might have known that Stephen and I were more than a match for a couple of amateur Hawkshaws.

Without turning his head, Stephen out of the corner of his mouth said, “Thanks, Adelaide. I’ll do you a good turn someday.”

“As if you haven’t once or twice already,” I exclaimed, apparently addressing the farther corner of the elevator cage.

“Gosh,” murmured one of the fledgling policemen, “I always heard that crazy people talk to themselves.”

“Till tomorrow, light of my eyes!” cried Stephen gaily, sweeping me an elaborate bow when the elevator stopped at his floor. “Granting we both live to greet another dawn,” he added with what might have been a warning and could have been a threat.

It was all very well for him to treat the matter facetiously, but both of us knew he had not been playing solitaire in his room when he plunged out upon the fire escape to my rescue. I may have been as good as standing on my head at the time, yet I had distinctly seen the window from which he vaulted, pausing only to slam it to behind him. It was the window in the bedroom of my old suite on the fourth floor. And that was not the worst of it.

As Stephen Lansing neared the top of the iron staircase, staring incredulously at my, to be quite fair, strictly undignified situation, our gaze fastened at the same instant upon something lying on the landing at the level of his chin. I cannot even yet explain how I contrived, in the midst of my frantic scramble to maintain my equilibrium five stories above the earth, to get my hands on that bedraggled pink rose first, nor could I doubt from the look on Stephen Lansing’s handsome face that for one tense moment he had an almost irresistible desire to remove at least one complication from his path forever by wringing my neck without further ado or possibly just by loosening my tenuous clutch on security, a simple feat considering my position at the time.

“It’s getting so in this house, death, like taxes, is just around every corner,” I told myself after I had closed and locked my door behind me.

The window upon the fire escape, thanks to Officer Sweeney’s carelessness, was still standing wide open, the curtain flapping dismally in and out. Clenching my teeth, I went over, jerked the window down and bolted the latch. Not until I had carefully lowered every shade and, as an extra precaution, had hung one of my felt hats over the keyhole did I remove the rose from the top of my stocking where the thorns had pricked my game knee unmercifully for the past hour.

“You fool! You doddering old fool!” I accused myself unsteadily.

“As if there aren’t a million pink rosebuds in the world!” But it was no use. My own eyes confounded me. Curled around the stem of the rosebud was a bronze hair which gleamed in the light in the chandelier above my head.

“Then Kathleen was on the landing, God help us all!” I cried, putting my hand to my throat which seemed to have closed up with dismay.

It was then I noticed for the first time that the string of bright red stones was gone from about my neck.