“Nah, not so much.” He saw I was serious. “She’s swell folks. Owns a flock of oil wells or something. But nice and quiet, I mean. Real friendly. And that maid of hers — whoo-deedoo!”
“Ever notice one particular friend of hers?” I described the joe in the oversized tux.
“I know ’m.” He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger; Zingy’s quite a buster with that sign language; maybe he has Indian blood in him. “I hear he’s been hangin’ around heavy, I saw him there one mornin’ when I was double-dutying, and even then he was dipping into the clear broth of bourbon, but not in his pocket. Lets her put out with all the cash. But,” he held up a palm, traffic-cop style, “I never hear he’s making like love in bloom. You ask me, Mister V.—”
“I’m asking.”
“He’s not her joy friend; he’s strictly for biz. I wouldn’t know what the deal is, but—”
“But from here in, you’ll keep your ears fanned out. Swell. Do so.” I went upstairs to the head housekeeper’s office.
Ada Munster’s a sad-faced, stringy-haired, skinny old gal with an eighteen-carat heart and a full quota of savvy about human nature. She’d have to have the savvy, after being in charge of twelve hundred bedrooms for three hundred and sixty-five nights a year, ten years. Be surprised some of the peculiar things you learn about people, making up bedrooms.
“I didn’t want to bother you.” She hauled a pillow slip out of a paper laundry bag on a chair beside her desk. “It’s not enough, we have to salvage linens after all the lipstick smears and even tallow,” she pointed to a turquoise nylon spread with little dime-sized discs of wax on it, “but oil!”
I smelled. Light machine oil. “You said there was something else?”
She turned the slip over, pointed to fine, sandy hair-clippings about an eighth of an inch long, embedded in the percale. “She has black hair, Mister Vine. Her maid has black, too.”
“Thanks, Ada.” There’s no law against sleeping with a revolver under your pillow, though it puts a guest on the Watch List and keeps him there. But we do have rules about unregistered males in the beds of female guests. Those hairs were from a freshly barbered he. Miss Marino’s sandy-haired escort, down in the lobby, had been well-groomed. “I’ll check on it, Ada. Anything else?”
“Well—” she looked unhappy, “we don’t wish to complain about guests who can afford that kind of suite. But the maids say they never can get in either of the bedrooms until late in the afternoon, sometimes, as tonight, not before four-thirty. That makes it hard for us, with so many rooms to rack up, and really it is quite unusual for a lady to want to be in her suite all day with the beds unmade! Don’t you think?”
I did think. “Where’s the maid who had sense enough to spot that gun stain?”
“Elsie Dowd? Mrs. Dowd’s still up on the twenty-first. I can call her—”
“Never mind. I’ll go up. Tell her she rates an extra day’s vacation pay. Thanks a lot, Ada.”
Elsie was checking off soap and tissue on her stock list beside the 2100 linen closet.
“I hope I didn’t make any trouble for Miss Marino, Mister Vine.” Elsie was fiftyish and sallow-eyed; she was a little frightened. “She’s been real nice to me, personally.”
“Tips you? All that?”
“Oh, most of them do. But Miss Marino makes you feel she’s interested in you. She’s so sweet. But it’s these men—”
“Plural?”
“Understand, I’m not suggesting anything wrong.” She was uneasy. “But there are generally a couple of men around. There’s one in her suite right now—”
“Probably her cousins.” I gave her a reassuring shoulder pat. “Think no more about it.”
I thought about it. No hotel likes a male patron who invites women up to his suite, particularly in the evening. But any good house would rather have a dozen like such than one woman who attracts men to her suite. That’s bad. For business, I mean.
I knocked at the 21MM living-room door.
No answer.
I rattled keys.
A gruff bass voice: “Who you want?”
“This the house officer.”
“Miss Marino’s not here.”
“Open the door.”
“Hell I will.” He sounded tough.
“You’re not registered in this suite.” I raised my voice so Elsie would hear me and come along the corridor. “Open up, or I will.”
“Try it!” he growled. “You’ll damn well wish you hadn’t.”
In my book there’s only one thing to do in a case like that.
So I did it.
Chapter two:
Streak of blood
Ordinarily, I’d never have walked in on him, cold like that. Not after a warning. Especially not after learning some party’d been snoozing with a persuader under his pillow!
Thing would have been for me to stay out there in the corridor, watch all three of the suite’s doors, and send Elsie to phone for Duman. Then we’d have had two witnesses to any action which might lead to a suit against the hotel.
But this seemed to be an emergency. The guest was out. Somebody else was in her suite. If the guy was there with her permission, still I’d be entitled to look into this free-wheeling pretty who entertained her men friends in our bedrooms.
So I used my master key, gave the door a push, stepped back fast enough to make it tough for him to get a snap shot at me, but not so sudden he couldn’t see me.
Fifteen steps farther along was the door to the suite’s east bedroom. I got to it, quick and quiet. While I was unlocking it, I called to Elsie, loud enough to cover the click of the latch, “Phone Mister Duman, ask him to hustle up.”
I went in, catfoot. The twins were made up. The spreads weren’t mussed. No men’s clothes around. No male brushes or such on the bureau. Only a trace of parfum de panatella. From a ten-cent cigar, if I’m any judge.
The door to the long living-room was half open. Through it I could see the back of a white linen suit. The man was close to the door of the bedroom on my side. I was only ten feet away when I saw him. His left elbow leaned on the bulgy-eyed television set all those double-letter suites are equipped with. Shielded by the cabinet, his right hand hung down so the automatic he held would be hidden from anyone coming in from the corridor to the living-room.
All I could see was that narrow-shouldered but nicely tailored back, the thick and well-tanned neck. And the gun.
He was concentrating on that door so it was no trick to come up behind, grab his wrist before he heard me.
He didn’t battle. Just used one explosive obscenity, then kept still, vocally and otherwise.
While I was prying the gun out of his paw I started to make a crack about house rules forbidding the brandishing of weapons. But when he twisted around so I got a look at his face — I didn’t bother to finish. I was more astonished than he’d been.
He didn’t recognize me; least he didn’t know who I was; he might have noticed me around the lobby. But the tenseness didn’t go out of those smooth, freshly barbered college-boy features which contrasted so handsomely with the curly white hair. That hair was by way of being his trade-mark, so thick and tight it might have been a wig carved out of marble. It really did have the polished look of marble.
I’d have known him, of course, even if he hadn’t been a spectacularly splurgish patron of the Plaza Royale. Even with his ten-dollar cravat a bit on the bias and his brown-agate eyes squinting with alarm, he could have marched smack off the front cover of that weekly which had run his portrait in color, week or so ago. All he needed was that background the mag had used as a frame for his picture — the horn of plenty spewing out a cornucopian flood of slick convertibles, summer cottages, shiny refrigerators, outboard motors, movie projectors, washing machines, all showered round with coins of the realm. Yair, sure. Dow Lanerd.