Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (25 page)

He sighed. “Her loyalty is one of the most touching things I ever saw.”

“She’s lovely in every way.”

“Yes!” he cried.

So I had not been such an old fool, after all, when it came to matchmaking, I thought exultantly. Stephen Lansing may never have been in love before, I told myself, but he was in love now, head over heels in love with Kathleen.

“The bigger they come, the louder the splash,” I observed with apparent irrelevance, though he caught the drift.

“Don’t be silly!” he protested, then, avoiding my eye, laughed unsteadily. “Got my number, have you, Adelaide? Oh well!” He shrugged his shoulders. “Only she can’t endure me, you know.”

I had an entirely different idea, but I did not say so. Fond as I had grown of the dashing young Mr Lansing, I believed it would do the slightly too attractive gentleman no harm to occupy the uncertain seat for a change, if only briefly. It has been my experience that people, men especially, value most that which is most difficult to come by. And on one thing I had set my foolish and stubborn old heart. Not if I could prevent it would Kathleen’s romance be aborted as had been her father’s and mine. It was perfectly true that, but for circumstances, she might have been my own little girl. At any rate, that is how I felt about her, and still do, God bless her!

“Sophie is terribly broken up,” I went on, more to change the subject than anything. “I don’t suppose you and the police found Cyril Fancher in the basement, Stephen?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t expect to, and the inspector was balmy even to look. He thought he had the basement bottled up. My eye! There are at least six skylights in the place through which a desperate man could crawl to the street.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Neither did the inspector till Sweeney discovered the one in the laundry chute hanging open. It leads onto the alley behind the hotel.”

“So that’s the way he went.”

Stephen shrugged his shoulders.

I sighed. “Surely he can’t have got far. Isn’t-isn’t there a very good chance of capturing him, Stephen?”

He shrugged his shoulders again. “We’ve sent out notices all over. Trains and buses and even airports are being patrolled, and we’ve got scout cars combing the town.”

“Then he can’t get away!”

He frowned. “The gang operating in and out of New Orleans, Adelaide, has a very thorough organization. We have been able to line up their connections at that end. We can arrest them any minute. The department has been waiting only till I grabbed my man here, for fear of giving the alarm and losing him, though I’ve muffed my part of the show, damn the luck! However, none of us has ever known for sure how the girls are taken to New Orleans. We think by a line of interstate trucks, most likely, supposedly carrying legitimate loads, probably belonging to some perfectly honest concern which does not dream that on certain nights their freight is human, bound for hell.”

I shivered. “It’s too terrible!”

“Not knowing more than we do about this end of the business, it is quite possible that, once safely out of the hotel, Cyril Fancher or anyone else could be carted away under the very nose of the police without our being able to do a thing about it.”

“Oh dear!”

“It’s certain arrangements had been made for a shipment tonight.” He winced. “There was Gloriana and – and the Wilson girl.”

“You think he killed her?”

“She has undoubtedly been wounded. Probably put up a desperate resistance when captured and had to be silenced, if only temporarily.” He sighed. “Dead or alive, he took her with him.”

“How-how do you know?” I faltered.

“She, also, isn’t to be found.”

“Oh!”

He scowled. “It’s a strain on the imagination to believe he crawled through a skylight, carrying a severely injured girl with him, and got completely away in broad daylight unobserved.”

“It sounds impossible!”

“Nevertheless, some man reported having seen a large covered truck near the alley entrance at two and later. Of course, it did not occur to the boob to take the number or investigate.”

“People have so little foresight.”

“Yes, including this boob,” said Stephen ruefully, “or I shouldn’t have made the mess I did of this.”

“Ridiculous! As if you could help...”

However, at that minute Inspector Bunyan knocked on my door. He, too, looked tired and discouraged as he sank into the chair I offered him. There were dusty smudges on his dapper suit and a blob of soot astride his nose.

“Any luck?” inquired Stephen, plainly expecting none.

The inspector shook his head. “He stepped right through that skylight into the truck, sir, and dragged the girl in after him.”

“Think so?”

“The truck was waiting for her and the Quack-Quackenberry girl?”

“Maybe.”

“He wouldn’t risk keeping them hidden in the basement a minute longer than absolutely necessary. I figure that’s how he worked it all through. Once he nabbed his victim, he shipped her south as quickly as possible.”

“But,” I protested, “Annie’s been missing since yesterday noon.”

“He was going to make it a two-bagger,” explained the inspector. “I mean, he held the Wilson girl over, probably tied up in another of those empty crates by the furnace, till he could get the other waitress to go along with her.”

“Quite a risk, grabbing two at once,” muttered Stephen.

“I think you guessed it, sir, when you said after he killed Reid, and then was forced to kill the others, he was preparing for a last big haul and a quick run out before it got too hot to handle.”

“I simply can’t picture Cyril Fancher as a murderer and b-blackmail... white slaver, I mean,” I stammered. “He always struck me as such a spineless person.”

“You’re telling me,” muttered Stephen.

“I never liked him,” I admitted, “and I could imagine his being a petty criminal of some kind, the sort who’s weak enough to get into trouble and too weak to get out again. I might even, by a stretch, imagine his being terrified enough to kill, to save himself, but never in ten thousand years would I have picked Cyril Fancher as the brains of anything, much less of such an elaborate and infernally clever scheme as this white slave horror.”

“That’s where I went wrong, Adelaide,” murmured Stephen Lansing with a sigh. “I was so busy looking for the subtle and fiendishly clever brain with a taint of madness in it, which the inspector described to us, I never, worse luck, brought myself to take Cyril Fancher seriously.”

The inspector flushed. “No matter how he impressed people, I think you’ll admit, both of you, that I was right in my analysis of the criminal’s psychology,” he said stiffly and added with a touch of malice, “At least he was clever and subtle enough to walk right through my net, and yours, Mr Lansing.”

“And is my face red!” groaned Stephen.

“I still can’t see why he failed to take Gloria along,” I said. “He must have known as soon as she was found his game was up.”

“He didn’t have time for everything in the minutes at his disposal,” muttered Stephen, “and I dare say he didn’t expect her to be found – not, at least, alive.”

I shuddered, and the inspector pursed his lips. “The Wilson girl was bleeding. He couldn’t hide her away, even in a trash heap, without a chance of somebody spotting the trail.”

“I suppose,” said Stephen thoughtfully, “you noted, Inspector, that an attempt had been made to wash away the stains in the dressing room. I think that is when he realized that Miss Adelaide was about to walk right in on him.”

I remembered that I had heard the water running in the lavatory just before the light went out and shuddered again.

“That reminds me, Miss Adams,” said the inspector, “I have to get a statement from you describing the attack upon your person, a mere formality for the record but...”

At that precise moment Ella Trotter knocked at the door and then with her usual impetuosity immediately opened it and entered.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, stopping short at sight of my guests. “I didn’t realize you were occupied, Adelaide.”

She looked wistful, as though she hoped to be asked to stay. Ella always enjoys being in on everything. However, I can be extremely firm if necessary.

“I am occupied,” I snapped. “I’ll see you later, Ella.”

“Don’t put yourself out, pray,” she remarked huffily. “I only came to bring the hose I got Lou to mend for you – as a special favour, Adelaide.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling guilty as I accepted the package but determined not to weaken.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, starting to close the door behind her, and then, putting her head in again through the crack, “I forgot to say, Adelaide, that Lou found your green spectacle case in your knitted bag when she went to fix it.”

“My green spectacle case?”

“I hope you haven’t needed it,” she said.

I simply stared at her in silence, and finally she shut the door with a bang, this time for good.

“Why so agitated, Adelaide?” drawled Stephen Lansing as I began to fumble in the drawer of the bedside table.

“The woman’s crazy,” I snorted, picking my green spectacle case up from where only that morning I had deposited it in the table drawer.

“Maybe not,” said Stephen Lansing softly. “Look in the-er-knitted bag, Addie.”

My hands trembled slightly as I opened the package which Ella had given me and examined the contents.

Lou Trotter is nearly a genius. It was impossible to detect where the threads had worn in two on the knitted bag, but in the bottom lay my green spectacle case, or one so like it I had to see the two together to know that the one which James Reid had handed me outside Ella Trotter’s door, shortly before he was murdered, was shinier and newer and a brighter green.

And so it all came out, everything which Stephen Lansing and I, poor fools, had tried so desperately to conceal. For under the lining of the second green spectacle case Inspector Bunyan discovered a number of thin sheets of onion paper covered with minute handwriting, James Reid’s handwriting – his record of the seven days which he spent under the roof of the Richelieu Hotel with his findings – and there was little about the private lives of its guests which he had not ferreted out and set down in fine indelible ink.

We knew then what the murderer had been searching for in my old suite and also in Room 511, without success, for after the crime the papers were not concealed under the carpet in 511, where until the day of his death Reid kept them, nor were they to be found in the suite where he died. Sensing that he was walking in danger of his life, he had, subsequent to returning my case to me that morning in the lobby, secreted his notes in his own spectacle case. Then late that same afternoon, feeling the peril closing in upon him, he palmed his case off on me as mine, for safekeeping as he thought.

Only not five minutes afterward I gave the knitted bag with its contents to Ella Trotter’s sister-in-law, and so it passed out of the hotel, but not, alas, forever. For that slim roll of papers had a terrible tale to unfold, one that blanched my face and Stephen’s and cost us the most terrible night of our lives. It was all there for the inspector to read aloud, as inescapable as death and the grave.

I had guessed correctly in one respect. It was Mary Lawson who employed the private detective, employed him to trap a blackmailer who was bleeding her dry. According to James Reid’s record, Mary had received dozens of those lascivious notes, such as I received, attacking her dead husband’s honour, claiming that there was a notorious woman of the town with him the night he died in an automobile wreck, claiming he had been intimate with the woman for months, even enclosing a snapshot of her, nude, in his arms, a snapshot which the blackmailer threatened to sell to the local scandal sheet unless Mary paid and paid.

“ ‘Of course,’ ” James Reid explained in his note, “ ‘the film is doctored, fixed up to look like what it ain’t, but try and prove it to the average person who all he knows is what he sees in the papers. At least it’ll comfort Mrs L when I tell her that her husband was never guilty of anything, except having one of his photographs superimposed on that damned woman’s after he was dead.’ ”

“Oh, thank goodness!” I breathed, knowing the anguish which Mary must have lived through, believing anything so shameful of the husband she still loved enough to make every sacrifice to preserve his memory.

“ ‘But the only way to kill the thing,’ ” James Reid wrote on, “ ‘is to get the film, except to do that you got to catch your blackmailer first. Note – This stunt smacks of Broadway, the kind of smart racket they pull off on the big stem.
Whoever he is, there are no hayseeds on this guy. That water pitcher is as clever a dodge as I ever run into for collecting the dough without leaving a trail to himself, to say nothing of the brown wrapping paper. But they don’t come so smart, they don’t stump their toe sometime, and sooner or later I’ll set a little trap and he’ll walk into it.’ ”

I shook my head. The blackmailer had not walked into James Reid’s trap nor mine nor yet Stephen’s. The inspector read on. Lottie Mosby’s sordid history was there in black and white, but James Reid believed she had been deliberately enticed into gambling by the blackmailer. “ ‘He let her win at first, and then when she got in so deep she couldn’t get out, he forced her to sell herself to men and took half her receipts not to tell the husband.’ ”

Nowhere, however, was there any mention of the threatening note which the distracted girl admitted she wrote and which she was supposed to have left in James Reid’s box at the desk a few hours before he was murdered.

“Come to think of it,” murmured the inspector with chagrin, “the note had no salutation. She started right out saying she couldn’t pay any more. There is a chance it was not addressed to James Reid at all.”

“So I noticed at the time,” remarked Stephen dryly.

“If she didn’t write it to him, then she wrote it to the blackmailer!” I exclaimed.

“Precisely,” muttered Stephen.

“We found it torn up in James Reid’s wastebasket,” stammered the inspector. “Naturally we supposed-er-we supposed that –”

“I believe you’ve said all along, Inspector,” interrupted Stephen, reciprocating malice for malice, “that our criminal is both clever and subtle.”