Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (28 page)

I remembered then that Sophie had always wanted a baby. It had been the regret of her life that she and Tom Scott had been unable to have children.

I put out my hand and awkwardly patted her arm. “I didn’t understand, Sophie; I’m sorry,” I faltered.

She began to weep again, softly and wearily, as though she had no strength left for violent tears, and finally she moved slowly away, back through the kitchen, while I drearily cut up the food on my plate, without being able to eat a mouthful.

Stephen had promised to telephone, but I had no desire to receive his message in the presence of an audience, even if I had had the effrontery to sit there, self-conscious and distressed, the cynosure of every speculative glance in the lobby. So right after eight, holding my head very high, I went up to my room. Once there it was a relief to let down and give way to my intense dejection. It was nine when Stephen called, and he still had been unable to get in touch with Kathleen at police headquarters.

“They’re keeping both her and the inspector incommunicado,” he said savagely, “God knows why. But I’ll crash through their smoke screen if I have to get the authority from Washington.”

He promised to call me again as soon as there was news, but time dragged on, and it was eleven and then half past and no word from Stephen. I was horribly tired, both physically and emotionally.

Wearily I got into my bedroom slippers, removed my false curls, and scrubbed my face. I slipped off my dress. I thought it possible that if Stephen had nothing good to report he might come by my room instead of telephoning. It was my intention to replace my bridge if he knocked at my door. I took it out only because in that fracas in the basement it had been pressed into my upper jaw so hard by my assailant as to cut a small place in the gum.

“The idea of their accusing that child of attacking me!” I fumed, beginning to pace the floor because I was too nervous to keep still.

I thought nothing at first of that faint knocking sound above my head. Being an old building, the Richelieu Hotel is alive with queer snappings late at night. I do not know just how long I had subconsciously been aware of this particular noise or when I first noticed that it was different from any other I had heard the old floors and walls give out.

“It reminds me of when we used to have a branch telegraph office in the lobby,” I remember thinking with a small part of my wits, the rest of my brain frantically engaged, as it had been all evening, with the plight of the girl who was the daughter of my heart if not of my body.

“It sounds just like the click of a telegraph key,” I muttered absently and then stopped dead-still in my tracks, my face stinging as if I had broken out with prickly heat.

After a while I tottered over to the telephone and called the desk. My voice was hoarse with excitement, and I had totally forgotten my bridge, the absence of which causes me to lisp unintelligibly. However, I finally made Pinky Dodge understand.

“No,” he said, “Mr Lansing hasn’t come in, Miss Adelaide. I’m certain, because I’ve been watching for him myself, to-to offer my sympathy.”

He hesitated. “Miss Adair seemed such a sweet young lady.”

“Pinkthy,” I stuttered, “get Mr Lansing on the phoneth for me at onceth. You’ll find him at policeth headquarters. It’s terribly importanth.”

“Yes, Miss Adelaide.”

However, he called me back in a few minutes to say he had been unable to locate Stephen Lansing anywhere. My hand trembled on the receiver.

“I musth see him as soon as he cometh, Pinkthy. You won’t forgeth?”

“No, Miss Adelaide.”

“No matterth how late?”

“Yes, Miss Adelaide.”

“And-and, Pinkthy,” I went on, my voice quivering uncontrollably, “could you possibly get me a copy of the Morse codeth?”

“The Morse code, Miss Adelaide?” repeated Pinky as if not sure he had heard aright.

“Yes, Pinkthy, and I musth have it at onceth. It’s a question of life and death.”

“Yes, Miss Adelaide, I’ll bring it right up,” said Pinky wearily.

I suppose there are few objects, however improbable, which in his twenty years as night clerk Pinkney Dodge had not been required to produce at a moment’s notice for some impatient guest.

Nevertheless, he seldom failed to supply a demand, and I had no uneasiness on the delivery of the Morse code.

“Pinkthy will locate one somewhere,” I told myself comfortably.

It was the last comfortable moment I was to know for some time. I heard the elevator stop on my floor, and then somebody kicked at the door.

“Who is it?” I called out, popping my bridge into my mouth.

“It’s Pinky, Miss Adelaide.”

I was fastening my dressing gown and having trouble with the snaps. “Just a minute, Pinky,” I spluttered, “till I hook this dratted thing. Women’s clothes always fasten in the most ungodly places.” Later I was to thank God the snaps were particularly stubborn that night!

“Yes, Miss Adelaide.”

Still muttering under my breath as I struggled with the last recalcitrant snap, I moved toward the door. At that moment the window on the fire escape slid noiselessly up before my very eyes.

I had until then imagined that the expression ‘frozen in one’s tracks’ was a literary figure of speech. I was mistaken. As that window eased silently upward I literally turned to ice. I could not have taken a step or uttered a sound to save my life. I had room for only one thought. What in God’s name was lurking on the fire escape and how soon would it pounce?

“Pull yourself together, Adelaide,” whispered Stephen Lansing. “Act, if you’ve never acted before. I’m not here, understand?”

I stared at him, unable to believe my eyes. He was crouched down upon the landing of the fire escape, and in his hand he clutched a stubby blue-black revolver.

“Don’t you dare faint, Addie,” he added.

“Young man,” I snapped, “I never faint.”

“Oh yeah?” murmured a hoarse voice.

For the first time I realized that the bulky shadow below Stephen was Officer Sweeney. I had involuntarily kept my voice down to match theirs, but I had forgotten Pinkney Dodge until Stephen motioned toward the door.

“Let him in,” he said and added in a grim voice, “Everything now depends on you.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” I muttered crossly.

“You will have,” said Stephen and again motioned to the door.

“Remember, I’m not here.”

My knees were trembling when I opened the door. I was still fumbling with the snap on my dressing gown. Thank heaven, the light was behind me. Pinky was standing there, gazing at me in his vague way, and he had a paper in his hand.

“Is that the code, Pinky?” I asked and reached for it.

Pinkney continued to gaze at me without speaking. It was then I became aware that there was something wrong with his eyes. It occurred to me that I had never met Pinky’s direct glance before. Usually his eyelids drooped, but they were wide open now and his pupils were unnaturally dilated.

“You’ve brought it on yourself,” he said as he stepped forward. “I’d rather not have hurt you.”

I was having trouble getting my breath because of the knife which he was holding against my ribs, a common butcher knife from the Richelieu kitchen.

“You’re the only person in this house who ever treated me as if I might be human,” Pinkney went on, his voice dull and lifeless yet somehow dreadful.

I made a slight movement, and the knife pricked me even through my heavy robe. “Keep still,” said Pinkney Dodge. “I’m desperate, you know. I have been for a week.”

The inspector and even Stephen Lansing had believed that back of the Richelieu murders there was a diseased brain which had gone off the track. They were wrong. There was only poor frustrated Pinkney Dodge, terrified for his life, killing as a cornered rat might kill in a frantic effort to save itself.

He gazed at me with dumb entreaty. “Life has cheated me for years,” he said. “I never had anything other men have – friends or fun or sweethearts.” A spasm twisted his face. “Not until I met Hilda Anthony.”

So it was Pinky whom the Anthony creature had used to pull her chestnuts out of the fire, I thought with a shudder. It seemed incredible until I recalled that it had taken all Pinkney made to keep his mother. No other woman had ever looked at him, and Hilda Anthony was beautiful. She had also been clever, clever enough to realize that a clerk in a residential hotel, especially a night clerk, has every opportunity for blackmail and other sordid rackets.

“She cared nothing for me,” whispered Pinkney as if he had read my thoughts, “nothing except what she could get out of me. But I wanted her, wanted her as I’d never wanted anything on earth.”

My voice trembled. “It was you who-who ...”

He nodded. “To all of you I was that poor worm, Pinky Dodge, whom nobody ever noticed. Just a robot with a voice who waited on you at the desk and took your orders over the telephone. I could pass right through the lobby in front of everybody without any of you seeing me.”

It was true. No one ever paid any attention to Pinkney Dodge. He was merely part of the landscape at the Richelieu, like the drinking fountain behind the elevator or the coat rack by the door.

“What about Cyril?” I stammered.

Pinkney’s long upper lip curled. “She tried Fancher first. He was horrified at her ideas, but she had a hold on him. She made him help me.”

“And you fell for her!” I cried in an outraged voice. “How could you?”

“I told you,” he said. “I wanted her. Enough to risk anything! Nothing seemed to matter except that at last I was to get something out of life.”

I have said that if frustration had a body it would look precisely like Pinkney Dodge, poor weak fool who had fallen prey to an unscrupulous and conniving woman.

“Then,” said Pinky, his face ghastly, “James Reid came and he got onto us. He was going to turn us up if we didn’t give him half our takings. I was in a panic, but Hilda was unwilling to split with anybody, and I can’t afford to get caught, Miss Adelaide. You know I can’t. There’s my mother. I had to get Reid; I had to. Surely you understand that.”

Again he stared at me entreatingly. I think it was a relief for him to talk to someone, anything to unbosom his soul of its dreadful burden. But the knife in his hand did not waver nor did the stark purpose in his red-rimmed eyes.

“So I killed him,” he said, sucking in his breath with a gasp. “Hilda put him on the spot for me and I killed him. Cut his throat and then hung him to the chandelier. You see, I had to be sure. I couldn’t risk his coming alive again, could I?”

I shuddered. That was why each of his victims had been murdered twice. He had been afraid, scared out of his wits. It was no subtle brain behind the crimes. It was only panic-stricken Pinkney Dodge, berserk with terror, striking blindly again and again to make sure his victims were dead.

He licked his lips as if they were very dry. “But the danger didn’t die with Reid. He left some notes. Hilda heard him tell the Adair girl so. Only I couldn’t find them. I looked everywhere – in your old suite, in the room he occupied. I couldn’t find them. But Lottie Mosby knew where Reid hid the notes. That was what she was after when she ran away from the police. She meant to give them the notes and let me hang for it. So I had to kill her too.”

He gave me a pathetic look. “After that, everyone’s hand was against me, even Hilda’s. She thought she could betray me to the police without my knowing. But I am going deaf and I can’t afford to on my job, so I’ve studied lip reading. I read every word Hilda said to you this morning. It’s funny she was afraid of me when I loved her so. She would have betrayed me. I had to kill her. There was nothing else to do. But the Adair girl will hang for it.”

“You fiend!” I gasped.

“I have to save myself! I have to!” he cried hysterically. “I couldn’t stand to die on the gallows! I tell you, I couldn’t stand it! I’ve seen nothing else for a week except the black hood settling over my face.”

He was trembling and drops of sweat stood out on his long upper lip, but he gave me a reproachful look. “I didn’t want to kill you, Miss Adelaide. Only you will meddle in things which don’t concern you; first this afternoon and now tonight. I can’t have you babbling to Stephen Lansing about Morse codes.”

“The waitress Annie,” I faltered, “she’s somewhere above me?”

“In the attic,” he said.

I had known but forgotten that there is an attic of sorts at the Richelieu, no higher than the head of the average child and unfinished. Unlike more modern buildings, the hotel does not have a penthouse. The elevator swings from the roof. If it gets out of adjustment, the mechanics have only two choices. They can get at the machinery through an open space behind the shaft in the basement or work on it from above in the attic. More significant still, I recollected that the only entrance to the attic is by a trap door in the tiny room on the fifth floor which Pinkney Dodge had occupied for years. The trap door was kept locked, but that was no protection against Pinkney, who as night clerk possessed a pass-key to every lock in the house. No wonder bolts had come to mean nothing at the Richelieu.

“She’s in the attic!” I gasped.

“I’ve arranged to ship her to New Orleans late tonight by truck,” he said. “Along with Cyril’s body.”

“His body!” I quavered.

He nodded. “Cyril lost his head this afternoon and attacked me. He believed I was planning to kill Sophie. I had to cut his throat. It was his bloodstains I was washing up when you all but walked into me in the basement.”

Poor Sophie, I thought. But she was right and I had been wrong about Cyril Fancher. He had loved her. He had loved her enough to give his life for her.

“Where is he now?” I faltered.

“Tied to the top of the elevator.”

I knew then what I had got on my sleeve that night which resembled rust. It was not rust; it was Cyril’s life blood. But not till later did I know it was that which first set Stephen Lansing on Pinkney’s trail, that and Stephen’s stubborn refusal to believe in Kathleen’s guilt. He warned the police that Pinkney Dodge was back of everything. They laughed in his face. They said the idea was preposterous. Fortunately for me, Stephen did not think the idea preposterous.