I laid the automatic on the coffee table beside a silver bowl with yellow lilies floating on water. “Maid reported a man in this suite, Mister Lanerd.” I knew the sandy hair-clippings hadn’t come from his cranium. He wouldn’t have been smoking cheap stogies in this social-register atmosphere.
“Naturally I’m here by invitation.” He kept his face toward the corridor door. “What right have you to force your way in here, Mister—”
“Vine. Gilbert Vine. All the right in the world. If we learned that some unauthorized individual was prowling your suite, you’d expect us to investigate. Why object to letting a house officer in here?”
“Didn’t believe you were — an officer.” He sauntered to the coffee table, waited a second to find out if I’d say, ‘Mustn’t touch!’ When I didn’t, he picked up the automatic, slid it in his pocket, kept his hand there. But he wasn’t watching me; whatever danger he anticipated would evidently come from the corridor.
“Realize you have a job to do, Vine. Only I’m not exactly unauthorized. I’m registered here. My rooms happen to be just across the corridor — and since I had business to discuss with Miss Marino, I came across for a chat. Then she had to leave, asked me to wait until she returned.”
I let him see I didn’t buy it. “Didn’t look to me as if you were waiting for a lady.”
He gave out with one of the famed Lanerd boyish grins — a small-boy grin, partly sheepish, partly mischievous. Hard to dislike a man with a grin like that. “What’d be your reaction, if you’d been in a pretty girl’s apartment, suddenly a gruff voice demanded immediate entrance?”
“Worried about her husband?” I knew it hadn’t been that. If he’d feared what the tabs call a Jealous Mate, he’d have done what any other man would do — scramoose through one of the bedrooms, out to the corridor.
“She’s not married.” He approached the door, hesitated, peered down the corridor toward the elevators, twisted around to look in the opposite direction, came back in, shut the door. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if she had some close friend. Be easy to misconstrue the reason for my being here.”
“It certainly would have. When’ll Miss Marino be back?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“No?” That burned me. For him to think I could be dumb enough to believe she’d ask this hundred-thousand-a-year biggie to hang around her hotel room until her indefinite return. Or that he’d remain, on any such vague basis. “Where’d she go?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Know who she went with?” From the door of the west bedroom, I gave it the quick runover. Lingerie on one boudoir chair. Mules and nylons on the floor beside it. Gold brush and mirror on the dresser alongside a flock of crystal bottles, lacquered jars.
“Some friend.” Lanerd kept that winning smile on his face. “Wouldn’t it be better if you asked her, when she gets back?”
“I’ve known occasions when an early question saved a lot of trouble later. F’rinst—” I pointed to dark marks on the pile of the chartreuse broadloom, curving in a crazy parabola toward the door from the bedroom to the corridor, “why did somebody feel it necessary to move the bureau against her door? That was done after the maid vacuumed in here.”
Lanerd chuckled, a forced chuckle. “Some women never can stay in any place without shifting the furniture to see how it’ll look in a different arrangement. ‘Now, if the beds were only catercorner instead of straight against the wall,’ or ‘How would it be if—’”
“—we stopped horsing.” His assumption he was putting over that mahaha got under my skin. “I saw Miss Marino down in the lobby just now. Be my guess she was afraid of somebody then. I come up here, find you ready to plug any unwelcome intruder. Then there’s this, sometime after the maids were here this afternoon, she felt it was necessary to block the door with furniture. Then it was moved back where it belongs. People don’t do it for laughs.”
“Well—” Lanerd dropped the kidding attitude. “Not exactly, perhaps. But it isn’t as serious as you imagine.” He went to the video set again, inspected his wrist watch. “I’ve pledged my word not to tell a soul. But I’m going to tell you, because I can see you’re the persistent kind who’ll keep on until you’ve dug out the answer — and spilled the whole keg of nails, meantime.”
I said, “Damn white of you,” just to be saying something — anything — except what was running through my mind.
How’d you get that blood on your hand?
It was still moist; a thin streak of blood, glistening like a fresh scratch on the back of my left hand. It was no scratch. I hadn’t cut myself.
“There’s nothing sinister about it,” Lanerd was saying. “It’s all in a spirit of good, clean fun.”
He switched on the video set.
Chapter three:
Missing steak knife
My gang at those Friday night Dealer’s Choice Association gatherings will testify I’m far from psychic. But any dummy in a Fifth Avenue window could have sensed something nokay in that suite.
The blood — and the gun — were plain implications. And no security chief can afford violence in his hotel, however much he may admire it from the ringside at Madison Square. Naturally the front office doesn’t expect me to be wise to all the details every time something illegal or immoral goes on behind one of our twelve hundred locked doors. But the management does have a quaint method of insuring against too frequent trouble; unless the head man of the protection staff is sharp enough to catch the warning of those offbeat incidents which break into the regular rhythm of routine, he hunts for another job, but sudden. Hotels, like cars, ought to run smooth and quiet.
The indications of trouble in Suite 21MM were as plain as red blinkers at a grade crossing. Still, could be the troubles weren’t any of my business. I had to bear that in mind; the management being so skittish about being sued by annoyed guests.
Natural reluctance to run into people while wearing an eye patch might have kept a good-looking gal more or less hidden in her rooms for five days. She could have private reasons for two-ing around with a hard-eyed customer in a misfit dinner jacket. There could even be plausible justification for a guy sleeping in a gal’s hotel suite when they weren’t registered as man and wife.
But the blood on my hand was a tough one to explain. I had to find out about that. Even at the risk of offending the big billboard-and-broadcast man.
The gun was the only item I was sure I’d touched since coming in the suite. But if there’d been blood on my hands when I wrangled the automatic away from him, some would have smeared that nice white linen suit. It hadn’t. His sleeve was spotless.
Watching him fiddling with the dials, some of the stuff I’d read in that magazine came back to me:... a playboy who does his most dynamic work while having fun... who goes at sport as aggressively as if it was a top-drawer business deal... shoots golf in the middle seventies... flew his own six-place jet job to Alaska for black bear... sailed his ketch to Easter Island recently for monster marlin...
There’d been pages of such guff; he was a crack squash-rackets man, one of the country’s best off the high diving-board, what it added up to — no panty-waist, he. If the kingpin of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright had been jittery enough to carry side arms, there was more in the wind than cheap cigar smoke.