Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 36, No. 6, June, 1975

The Double-Breasted Coat by Herbert Harris

There wasn’t one witness to the daring hotel robbery except for an old soldier who refused to fade away…

It was on the night of the Grand Gala Dance in the big ballroom of the Hotel International that some person unknown brought off a mass raid on the luxury first-floor rooms and carried off every decent piece of jewelry in sight.

The dance band drummed out its version of current hits. A few hundred sweating dancers stamped and twisted around the lofty-pillared room. Above their heads a daring hotel pirate worked swiftly and silently.

It was much later at night when a women discovered what had happened. She ran, white-faced and in tears, from room 17 and sought out the hotel manager, who was in his private suite enjoying a late supper.

A diamond necklace had gone from her jewel-box. She would have been wearing it, only a rope of pearls went better with her black velvet. It had been a wedding-anniversary gift and had great sentimental value. Yes, she had locked her door, and had the key in her bag. So how could it happen?

The hotel manager was destined to remember that Grand Gala Dance as a sort of nightmare without an end. As the night wore on, reports of thefts came in thick and fast.

A watch set with diamonds from room 13, a small diamond tie-pin from room 12, some real pearls from room 11, a gold cigarette-case from room 14, some diamond dress-shirt studs and links from room 10, three assorted rings from room 16…

The Grand Gala Dance should have ended in a glorious explosion of noise and color. Instead it fizzled tamely. Victims of the room raider had spread their tales of woe. It threw a wet blanket over the whole proceedings.

“My God!” the manager said wanly. “What the directors will say about this little lot I tremble to think. ‘Where was the security?’ they will ask.”

He looked at the clock on the office-wall. Past two a.m. His face looked grey and drawn with fatigue.

“A wide-open opportunity,” observed Detective-Inspector Marshall, who had come on the case personally instead of sending his Number Two, because there had been a bit too much hotel piracy just lately. “I mean… everybody in the ballroom for the Gala Dance, and those first-floor rooms — where the people with the money stay — unprotected. Wasn’t anyone patrolling the floor?”

The manager sighed. “One girl. She was in the room where the linen is kept when this fellow walked in and shut the door behind him. The girls said, ‘What do you want?’ And then he twisted her arm behind her back and pressed a pad over her nose and mouth. Chloroform or ether, I suppose.”

“But the girl’s given a description of him?”

The manager nodded. “A smallish, slightly-built fellow. Dark hair, thin, dark moustache, sallow. Probably Italian by the look of him.”

“Any sort of accent?”

“He didn’t speak.”

“A hotel this size usually has a house-detective. Don’t you have one?”

“Not at the moment. Unfortunately our house-detective went sick with appendicitis just recently, and he hasn’t come back yet. I didn’t get a deputy. Took a chance. Silly, perhaps.”

The C.I.D. man said: “We all make mistakes, Mr. Frensham. What about the hall porter?”

“Ah,” the manager said, his grim expression brightening a little. “Now, we might have a productive source in Billington. That’s his name — Billington. Old sweat. Salt of the earth. Most reliable fellow in the whole place. You’ll want to talk to him, Inspector. I already have, as you know.”

“Did he say he had seen this fellow the girl described — the slim, dark-haired Italian-looking chap with the small moustache?”

“Yes,” answered the manager. “At least, a man left the hotel who seems to fit that description. Could easily be the one, according to the time Billington saw him.”

“Did Billington say anything to him?”

“Unfortunately, no. It was quite late, and the old chap — he’s no longer young, you know — had been helping on cloaks. There was a quiet spell and the old chap was sitting down resting his legs for a bit.”

“I see. Is he here now?”

“Yes,” the manager said. “We’d better go and find him. He’s having a lie-down somewhere. Poor old devil’s tired out. Been on his feet about twenty-two hours. ‘Have a bit of shut eye,’ I told him, ‘then we’ll have another talk. You might have thought of something by then,’ I said. Come on, Inspector, let’s go.”

Billington, the hall porter, got up smartly from an upholstered chair in one of the residents’ lounges when the manager bustled in with Inspector Marshall. He stood very erect, almost at attention, his back ramrod straight, thumbs in line with the side-seams of his well-pressed trousers.

He had been a regular army man, finally a sergeant-major, and it stood out a mile. Clear eyes shining keenly from under formidable bushy eyebrows, a healthy weatherbeaten skin. Every inch the parade-ground disciplinarian, the square-bashing so-and-so. The hotel had found him invaluable in curing the staff of any slovenly, slipshod habits.

If the hotel was short on security, it couldn’t be faulted on spit-and-polish, thanks largely to ex-Royal-Sergeant-major Billington.

“Ah, Mr. Frensham, sir, I was about to request permission to see you,” the hall porter said. There was a note of excitement in his voice, but suppressed to the level of good sober conduct.

“You were? You’ve remembered something vital?” the manager asked eagerly.

“I think it might be considered vital, Mr. Frensham, sir. At least worth reporting. With your permission, sir.”

“That’s fine, Billington. Let’s sit down. Inspector Marshall will be interested in anything you have to tell him, even if it’s only a mere theory.”

Five minutes after the hall porter began his clipped guardroom-style report, Inspector Marshall and the manager were making a bee-line for the latter’s office. The inspector waited impatiently while the manager thumbed feverishly through a thick file.

Then, a few minutes after the manager had found what he was looking for, the C.I.D. man was leaping in beside the driver of a police-car which had been waiting for him in the Hotel International’s car park.

He rapped out an address to the driver — a flat in a tall Victorian block not very far from the hotel.

And in scarcely any time at all, it seemed Marshall was listening at the door of flat seven as light scuffling footsteps sounded inside.

“Well, she’s coming all right,” he whispered to Detective-Constable Blakey, his face alight with anticipation. “And if it’s our girl, she won’t have had time to get rid of any of the—”

He broke off abruptly as the door was opened. A young brunette stood frowning at him. She was dark-skinned, dark-haired, her mouth large and sullen, her manner vaguely sluttish. He had seen more attractive Italian girls, Marshall told himself.

She was busy tying the belt of a thin wrap that enveloped her body, slim but full-breasted. She might or might not have been wearing some flimsy night garment beneath.

“Miss Maria Rossini?”

“Yes.”

Marshall introduced himself and Detective-Constable Blakey and they produced their police-credentials. “May we talk with you for a bit?”

“Yes, but…”

The two detectives had walked into the living-room of her flat before receiving her formal invitation. Marshall’s eyes ranged busily over the room, even taking in most of the girl’s bedroom, visible through an open door. He was particularly interested in what lay on the bed.

“That coat lying on the bed in there — yours, Miss?”

“Yes.” She had hesitated a moment, a convulsive movement in her throat.

Marshall walked briskly to the bedroom door, looked more closely at the coat.

“H’m… a double-breasted mackintosh, buttoning up both sides, light brown, bit soiled. On the roomy side for you. Miss… but good camouflage for…” His eyes flicked to the mounds of her breasts. “Certainly nice, deep, roomy pockets.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Her voice had a tremble in it. It could have been fear or anger.

“It’s a man’s coat,” Marshall said, watching her.

She swallowed again. Then her nostrils flared and a defiant look came into the smouldering eyes. “I do sometimes have gentlemen friends calling on me.”

“And they leave their coats when they go, do they? Oh, no, Miss Rossini, you aren’t entertaining any gentlemen tonight. You have been much too busy. Shall we look in those roomy pockets and see what’s inside them…?”

“No!” she shrieked out as he moved toward the coat.

Then, as he picked the coat up, she sprang at him, punching, scratching, biting, kicking. In that slim, lithe body was an animal strength that amazed him. Her red fingernails were like stilettos, her white teeth like wolfs fangs. Marshall endured them all, plus a crippling blow from her knee, before Blakey managed to pin her arms from behind and drag her away.

“Phew!” Marshall exploded, panted. He felt bruised and torn, but, by gum, it had been worth it, he thought.

She had been so sure of herself, so sure they’d never look for her, that she hadn’t even bothered to take the pieces of jewelry from the coat-pockets. Well, they’d start looking for a man, she had thought, not for a girl…

“Her short hair’s not really short enough to look masculine,” Marshall said, studying her. “We’d better see if there’s a man’s dark wig somewhere. And maybe a false moustache… unless she put that on with eye-black…”

The Italian girl spat out an obscenity. Marshall turned casually to her. “Better get some clothes on, love,” he said. “We’re going for a little trip.”

Later Marshall was sitting with the manager of the Hotel International and hall porter, Billington.

“You can see what happened, Mr. Frensham,” the detective said. “After you had sacked this chambermaid, Maria Rossini, she somehow contrived, while working out her week’s notice, to borrow a set of master-keys to the first-floor rooms and take wax impressions of them. Maybe some shady boyfriend put her up to that one.

“Then, with a set of keys made from wax molds, she came back on the night of the Grand Gala Dance. She knew the upper rooms would be deserted, and was helped by the fact that your house-detective was out of action.

“She came dressed in a man’s old mackintosh coat and disguished as a man. The bulky coat camouflaged her feminine curves, and the pockets held the chloroform pad she drugged the chambermaid with and also accommodated the loot as she went around collecting it.

“Her big mistake,” Marshall added, smiling, “was ever to unbutton that coat. But even a jewel thief must sometimes pay an urgent visit to the powder-room. Or would she have been wise to have used the other place?”

They laughed.

“It’s my old army training, sir,” Billington said. “Being a real old sweat and a sergeant-major and that. I mean, Mr. Frensham, sir, I can’t help noticing little oddities of dress… keeping a weather-eye open for irregularities of buttons and flaps and things.”

The manager and the inspector were trying not to treat the matter with levity.

“Came to me in a flash, sir. That was no man, I said to myself, that was a woman! I mean, sir, a man buttons a coat left over right, doesn’t he? And here was this shower of a fellow — or Eye-tye bird, if you’ll pardon the term, sir — walking towards the door, buttoning the coat right over left. Sissy, I thought. Then I had another think a bit later.”

“Lucky you did, Sergeant-Major,” said Marshall.