Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (4 page)

She came out into the hall, as if she meant if necessary to step between me and the Anthony woman.

“I ain’t stole no red tin box,” contributed Laura abruptly, swishing her mop about and glaring at us.

The Adair girl stooped swiftly and came up with something.

“Could this possibly be what you are looking for?” she asked and held out a small shiny scarlet box, labelled in gold with the name of a famous beautician on Park Avenue in New York.

The Anthony woman opened it, looked inside. “Nothing’s missing,” she said in an odd voice.

“If you are in the habit of strewing your belongings all over the place, you should be careful about accusing people of theft,” I said.

She gave me a baleful look. “Is that so? Well, I’m not careless, see? Not of anything that costs money. And artificial eyelashes do, plenty, this far from Broadway. The only place I ever strewed that box was in the top drawer of my dressing table. So what do you think of that?”

Having no desire to argue with her ilk, I walked on, my nose appreciably elevated, but I glanced back as I entered my suite and saw that Hilda Anthony was still regarding the tin box with a baffled frown between her thinly plucked eyebrows.

Our game starts promptly at two and ends on the stroke of five, no matter who is losing. It has been my experience that with stakes up, if only a quarter, one has to have ironclad rules. Nothing so sharpens the disposition as anything which touches on the pocketbook - or so I have observed. I have learned things I would never have dreamed about human nature at the bridge table.

Ella Trotter is my best friend and I myself am not a good loser, but nobody has ever bid to suit Ella or led to please her. She would win every hand in every rubber if she could. She might give you the quarter after the game is over, but during it she would as soon claw your eyes out as donate you a trick. There have been times during a session at bridge when relations between Ella and me have been strained to the breaking point. However, she is a good sort at heart.

I had no more than walked into my sitting room that day when Ella telephoned me. “My sister-in-law’s coming by late this afternoon. She has a stocking-mending machine. Bring down any you have with runs, Adelaide. I’ll get her to fix them.”

“Thanks, Ella,” I said.

“Don’t mention it.”

After she hung up I went through my laundry bag and collected a couple of pairs of hose which needed mending. Nothing nowadays, I reflected, has the wearing quality it used to have. That reminded me of my knitted bag. I have had it since I was twentyish. I distinctly remember that I made it the winter Father’s asthma was so bad and I was shut up in the house with him for months. It helped to while away the long tedious days to have something to do with my hands.

The bag is now out of date. Beside the smart envelope purses of today, it looks huge and clumsy with its dark green roses on a sapphire background and its heavy green glass handles. Nevertheless, though I seldom carry it any more, I have a sentimental attachment for the old relic, and on one of the capacious sides the stitches had broken.

“I’ll ask Ella’s sister-in-law if she can do something about that,” I said, laying the handbag on my bedside table.

Someone knocked at the door and called out, “Miss Adams! Could I see you a minute?” I frowned. It was Lottie Mosby. My face must have worn a forbidding expression, for she glanced at me in a feverishly apologetic way when I let her in.

“I hate to bother you,” she cried, the words tumbling over themselves in her haste. “I know you don’t like me. But...” She drew a long breath. “If I had anyone else to go to! But I haven’t.”

“You have a husband,” I reminded her.

As I have said, I had nothing in common with either of the Mosbys, although of the two I preferred the wife, scatter-brained as she was.

“Yes,” she said, her pretty, common little face going bleak, “I have a husband. That’s why...” She paused abruptly.

“Yes?” I asked.

Again she drew a long breath. “Dan’s the last person on earth I could go to in a jam.”

I raised my eyebrows. “In that case, it might be a good idea to stay out of jams.”

“But if you’re in, you can’t stay out. You just get in deeper and deeper,” she cried and added wildly, “It’s a vicious circle!”

“You read too many trashy novels,” I snapped.

She sighed. “I didn’t think you’d help me. I know, to a lady like you, I must seem impossible.”

She turned toward the door, her narrow shoulders sagging. In spite of her cheap rouge and her skimpy skirt, she suddenly seemed to me more like a scared, hopeless child than anything.

“What did you want me to do?” I asked stiffly.

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t.”

“Come, come,” I said gruffly. “Out with it.”

She looked back over her shoulder, and I was surprised to see how haggard she had grown since she moved into the hotel the year before. She couldn’t have been twenty-five and she had looked younger than that then. Now she had dark arcs under her eyes and a pinched look about her mouth.

“Would you lend me ten dollars?” she whispered.

I regarded her over my spectacles. “To throw away, as you’ve thrown the rest away, betting with the bookies.”

“You know everything, don’t you?” she asked sullenly.

“When a woman guest in this hotel keeps the porter busy running down the street to the bookmakers, everybody knows it, sooner or later.”

“I guess so,” she murmured drearily.

“Look here,” I said, “a place like this is the worst spot on earth for a young married couple.”

“You’re telling me,” she said, her lips trembling.

“You don’t have enough to do; no wonder you get into mischief. And if you ask me, your husband wouldn’t drink so much if he had anything else with which to occupy himself. Why don’t you two rent a little house and make a fresh start?”

In her shallow blue eyes there was a sudden radiance. “If we only could!”

“Forget wild oats,” I said bluntly, “and raise flowers and chickens – and babies for a change. You used to be in love with each other, I dare say.”

“Yes! Oh yes!”

“Well, then you’d probably be again with half a chance.”

“A chance! But that’s all I ask, just a chance!” she cried.

I shrugged my shoulders, and she caught my arm, clung to me pleadingly.

“That’s why I’ve got to have ten dollars! It’s-it’s my chance.”

“I suppose someone’s given you a tip on some broken-down race horse that can’t lose.”

“Neilson isn’t broken down. He’s sure to win, and the odds are twenty to one. Please, please, Miss Adams, if you knew! If you only realized! Two hundred dollars means the difference between heaven and hell to me.”

“No fool like an old fool,” I muttered and with a sniff took two five-dollar bills out of my purse.

“It’s the seventh race at Latonia,” she cried. “And God bless you!” She was gone, dancing down the hall with my ten dollars.

“That’s the last I’ll see of her,” I told myself grimly, it having been my experience that the quickest way to be rid of people is to lend them money.

I was feeling cross. It had been a nagging day. A number of things had upset me. Before I started for Grace’s room on the second floor I went over and jerked the shades down. The sun streams in my south windows half the afternoon. They look out toward the employees’ entry at the rear of the hotel. Middleway between is a rusty fire escape which no one ever used except the insurance inspector once a year.

Although the entrance is from the corridor, I can reach the iron railing of the fire escape from the back window in my bedroom. As I started to pull down the shades I remembered I had hung an intimate piece of my wearing apparel on the railing to dry that morning.

Guests are discouraged from doing laundry work in their rooms, but I doubt if there was a woman in the house who did not wash out handkerchiefs and underthings. I did, and do, whenever I felt so inclined.

I had leaned out to recover my garment, which was skittishly flaunting itself in the breeze to the satyrish amusement of two pimplish youths in the building across the court, when I saw the waitress Annie come out the rear door of the hotel, walk swiftly along the paved alleyway, and set off down the side street. I stared after her, feeling a catch in my heart. She was such a forlorn young thing. I wondered why waitresses never have any family and backing.

Not that I am familiar with a number of the profession; only the girls I had met in the Coffee Shop all were rather pathetically on their own, so far as I could tell.

“No wonder they flit in and out like June bugs,” I muttered.

It was then I noticed that a man had detached himself, apparently from nowhere, and was unobtrusively following the girl. I had to look twice to make sure I was not mistaken. It was the insignificant little man in the mousy-grey suit, Mr James Reid, of New Orleans.

“So that’s why the Adair girl glared at him as if she wanted to kill him,” I said to myself. “The man’s a masher. Who’d have thought it?”

Having lived around a hotel for years, I flatter myself that I can recognize the male flirt on sight. It was a jolt to my pride to discover that I had picked Mr James Reid as the last man on earth to annoy young girls with his misplaced attentions.

“I hope that Annie has sense enough to put the little shrimp in his place,” I muttered angrily.

I had an unhappy conviction, however, that the child did not have much idea about wolves in sheep’s clothing. It was a relief when, hanging far out the window for a better view, I saw a young man join her at the next corner, a young man who limped slightly and who wore what, even at that distance, I recognized as a worn pair of blue overalls and a battered slouch hat. They went off together.

She was clinging to his arm.

“At least she’s got somebody,” I remember thinking, “although he looks down on his luck, poor fellow.”

In my perturbation I accidentally dislodged the object I had hung on the fire escape. I made a grab for it, but, still flirting coquettishly with the breeze, it sailed lightly down, bellied out a little, then playfully flung itself at a window on the next floor where, to my consternation, a masculine arm in white shirt sleeves reached out and captured it.

“Is this – or should I say – are these your pink bloomers, Miss Adams?” murmured a mocking voice.

Speechless, I stared down into the insolent grey eyes of Mr Stephen Lansing.

He grinned at me. “It would, of course, be more gallant to keep them as a souvenir,” he said, “only how would we ever explain their presence in my room?”

“I-er-er...” I gasped. “The very idea!”

He laughed, rolled the bloomers into a bundle, and said, “Catch!” I am sure I made a ludicrous spectacle, leaning far out to receive against my capacious bosom the bulky package he tossed at me. I know my face was scarlet, for I could feel it.

“Young man,” I said, “you are entirely too fresh.”

“Ah, say not so,” murmured Mr Stephen Lansing, placing his hand on his heart with an exaggerated gesture of concern and sweeping me a profound and highly sardonic bow before I pulled down my window shade with a jerk that all but detached it from its moorings.

I had absolutely no luck at cards that afternoon.

If I held anything higher than a ten-spot, my partner had nothing. Ella Trotter was high, and Ella is as offensive a winner as she is a loser. Several times I felt if she crowed another time about the grand slam she made on me redoubled, I should fly into a thousand pieces.

However, as usual when the game was over, it was difficult to nurse a grudge against Ella. Her sister-in-law, a dumpy little woman who hopes to get Ella’s money when she dies, was waiting when we went up to Ella’s room on the third floor. Ella loaded the poor soul down with her own hosiery and mine.

“I don’t want to impose on you,” I said.

“Nonsense!” snapped Ella. “Lou likes to do things for me.”

Lou nodded feebly. She has been toadying to Ella for years, though it is my private opinion that Ella will outlive all her poor relations, if only for spite.

“I have a knitted bag,” I explained. “There is a run in one side. I don’t suppose you could mend that on your machine.”

Lou looked dubious, but Ella gave her no opportunity to say so. “Of course she can. Go and get it, Adelaide.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I still thought it unlikely that the bag could be mended, but, as Ella briskly pointed out, it could do no harm to try. I took the elevator upstairs. When I came back down the corridor I found Kathleen Adair and her mother waiting for the car.

“Did you ring?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the girl curtly, looking at me with the hostility which I had noticed in her eyes before.

“What a beautiful bag!” cried her mother. “I adore colours.”

She laid her hand caressingly on one of the green roses which stand out boldly even yet against the sapphire background of the knitted bag.

Kathleen Adair smiled. “I think in some other reincarnation Mother must have been a gypsy.”

I said nothing and, flushing a little, Kathleen moved aside for me to precede them into the elevator. I observed that she stood between me and her mother on the way down. The girl has a complex, I thought. She seemed to feel that she had to protect that spineless little creature from everybody. I believed it likely that Kathleen Adair had been standing between the older woman and reality for a number of years.

I got off at the third floor. Ella’s suite, like mine, is at the end of the back corridor, and I was in a hurry. Lou Trotter lived on the far side of town and she had to cook supper for herself and an invalid husband after she reached home. It gave me a turn to come upon Mr James Reid, of New Orleans, just outside Ella’s door.

He flashed me a queer look, and I am sure my glance at him was highly suspicious, for he had the grace to go a little pink. I could think of no good excuse why he should be on that particular floor. He had, so far as I had been able to see, no acquaintances in the hotel, and his room was on the fifth. I had made it my business to glance over the register again that noon to find out.