Dead of Night

Chapter fifteen: Ear to the wall

Now and again I meet some youngster who learns I’m a chief security officer. Usually he’s cram-full of notions about the fine points of sleuthing as reported by the ingenious gents who write up crime stories in the lurid mags with Real and Official and Inside in their titles. The kid’s usually very disappointed in me.

I can’t do any of the incredible things those clever cusses find so simple. According to their modest self-revelations, at any rate. One of ’em finds it easy to read a murderer’s lips fifty feet across a gloomy, smoke-shrouded barroom, thus “overhearing” details of some gory mayhem. Another has no difficulty searching a criminal’s eyes until he discovers the crook’s innermost secrets, turns him over to the stern hand of judge and jury. One expert claims to have broken a tough case by “mentalizing” a suspect’s mind. Whatever that is.

Many’s the time I’ve been disappointed in myself at not being able to put on such a performance. But it wouldn’t do to read guests’ minds. Not around the Plaza Royale.

My limitations force me to use the old-fashioned or garden variety of detection. When necessary to get the low-down on a party, I try to get close enough to hear what they’re saying. Or doing. As f’rexamp, outside the 2010 door of Mister Roy Yaker.

I didn’t have to lay my face against the panel. Or kneel to put my ear to the bottom of the door. I just lit a cigarette, leaned against the wall, and listened.

“Don’t rush me, dahrrling. I’m the shy type hates to be hurried.” The voice belonged to a honey in her late ’teens. Not shrill but penetrating, considering that hotel doors are purposely never soundproofed. “Where’s your biggie boy fren, dahrrling? You said he’d be here.”

Another more subdued feminine chime-in: “Yes, Mister Yaker, when’s Dow Lanerd coming? Or are we going somewhere to meet him? I’m just dying to meet that man. What is it they call him in the papers? Mister Giveaway? When is he—”

“Dow’s not going to be able to make it, kiddies.” Yaker, trying to quiet them. “We’ll have just as much fun—”

They put up a protest. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known Mister Lanerd wasn’t going to be here; that’s absolutely the only reason I—”

“Edie promised we’d meet Mister Giveaway; I’d counted on asking him some very important questions. Now you call him up, Roy boy, tell him we’re seething with—”

“He can’t come.” Yaker, again. “I just did talk to him on the phone.”

“You did not, either.”

“You don’t even know Dow Lanerd, betcha.”

“That was just a come-on.” They really went after Crew Cut.

“He’s home and he’s going to stay home. He’s not feeling up to par—”

“That old gag!” The second girl was contemptuous.

“It’s the truth.” Yaker giggled. “He’s suffering from an ingrowing wife. No fooling. That’s on the level. Call up his house in Manhasset, you don’t believe me.”

They mewed unhappily. The first girl had a suggestion.

“Maybe if I talk to him” — she put the old oomph into her voice to illustrate how she would lure him — “he’d change his mind.”

“He probably would,” Yaker agreed. “But you wouldn’t change Mrs. Lanerd’s mind. He got in some kind of girl jam just recently; she’s keeping a pretty close watch on him. He doesn’t even want his secretary to know he’s home. Now, I’ll tell you what — there’s a friend of mine, one of the most important statisticians in the country—”

I left while he was still selling it. It would be easy enough to get the girls out of the hotel without incurring the guest’s animosity; I wasn’t too much concerned about his amorous tendencies: those kids weren’t schoolgirl innocents; nothing more would happen than what they’d bargained for. But I was interested in what he’d said about Dow Lanerd’s being at home.

Yaker knew Lanerd; the girls had been arranged for with Lanerd; from what little I knew of Mister Giveaway, he wouldn’t pass up a party like that without letting Yaker know he wouldn’t be there. That remark about Lanerd’s having spouse trouble fitted in with what Ruth Moore had said. Maybe the head man of the Stack O’ Jack show had gone home without notifying Hacklin in order to avoid any further hassle with Mrs. Lanerd about being in Tildy’s suite. Or maybe he wanted to talk to his lawyers before he had a second session with Hacklin & Company.

One thing seemed clear enough. If anybody would know where the skating star had decamped to, he’d be the one. He’d have to know, or his television show would blow up in his face.

I had to get hold of Tildy Millett to clear Auguste, to knock down that inside-job obsession of Hacklin’s. I had to reach her before Hacklin did, too. Or they’d stop her from saying so much as hello to me.

Fran was down in the lobby, keeping an eye out for more of Edie’s sugarplums. I complimented her on tracing the first pair to Yaker’s room, told her to get Morry, send him up with that one-two punch: Guests in the adjoining room are being disturbed, sir, and, if that didn’t send the cuties scampering, five minutes later: There’s a man down in the lobby claiming his sister is up here in your suite, sir. We’re trying to keep him from coming up, but—

Fran said, “You won’t be around?”

I told her where I’d be. Signaled Zingy, none of his fancy manipulations, just the ancient crook-of-the-finger come-hither.

“What’ll it be, Mister V?”

I described the cream-colored suit Auguste had told about.

“Yeah.” Zingy laid one finger alongside his nose, Santa Claus style. Denoting intense concentration, no doubt. “I remember some customer — wearing a piece of custard pie like that. Lemme see, now—” He stared at the pattern in the carpet. He examined the shimmering chandelier which distinguishes the lobby. He gave up.

I was glad to find Auguste hadn’t been making it up; had been able to see the suit if he couldn’t delineate the wearer. But it wasn’t good news otherwise. The man wouldn’t have been Al Gowriss, the narcotic addict. Zingy wouldn’t ever have forgotten a face like that.

The individual who’d wiped his bloody fingers on Auguste’s sleeve had either been someone so ordinary, so average, so unworthy of notice that Zingy couldn’t pick him out of his memory file. Or he could be someone Zingy’d seen so often he’d been more impressed by the suit than by its owner.

Zingy was distressed. “I’ll wreck my brain, Mister V. Maybe it’ll come to me.”

“A week’s vacation pay’ll come with it, if it does.” I went out of the air-conditioning into the good smells of New York on a summer night — exhaust fumes, flowers in the Park, pigeons, the dejected horses between the shafts of the Victorias across the square.

I asked Ike, our admiral at the Fifth Avenue entrance, about the cream-colored suit. He couldn’t remember anything like that.

When I got my car rolling in the East Side express highway, I batted the whole business around my brain cells without getting any flash of intuitive brilliance.

Tildy Millett might have run out on Hacklin because she was afraid of being murdered by Al Gowriss or someone the killer hired. But Lanerd wasn’t in any danger from that source. Or was he?

Right down at the bottom of it, the thing that didn’t ring right to me was Roffis’s being knifed while Tildy Millett got away scot-free. Yet if Auguste had told it straight, the killer must have been in the suite with her immediately after murdering her guard. Only the maid, Nikky, would have been with her. But why, after having stuck his neck into a noose, hadn’t the man in the cream-colored suit used the steak knife on Tildy, to keep her from testifying regarding Johnny the Grocer’s death?

I was still chewing on that one when I slid over the Whitestone Bridge, along the Parkway bordering the Sound. By the time I slewed off the Shore Drive, between the huge stone gates of Chateau Lanerd, I was no closer to a satisfactory conclusion.

Dow Lanerd had himself fixed up right, out there on Manhasset Bay. A hundred acres, maybe more. All lawns and shrubbery, rose gardens and stables, little groves of blue spruce and winding paths. The house itself, looming against the stars and the sprinkle of moving lights out on the bay, seemed half as big as the hotel.

It was Norman French, massive gray stone with great wide doorways and tall, arch-topped windows. Lamplight showed through a dozen of the first-floor windows.

I parked, marched up broad stone steps, pulled at a knocker. A butler who gave the impression he didn’t care to have dealings with anyone below the rank of viscount said, “Mister Lanerd is not at home, sir. Your name, sir?”

“Gilbert Vine. Mrs. Lanerd in?”

His eyes roved past me down toward the white pier projecting out into the bay. “Was she expecting you, sir?”

“Probably not.”

“I am sorry, sir. She is not at home.”

I thanked him, went down the steps slowly until he closed the door. Then I sauntered off in the direction of the pier as if I’d been there before.

I expected him to be watching me as well as he could; certainly he’d notice I didn’t switch on my car lights. But probably he wouldn’t follow me.

The path led down an easy slope to a boathouse beside the pier. I kept on the grass, off the gravel.

When I got where I could see the pier, I could make out two figures silhouetted against the reflected glow from the water.

A woman in slacks and halter. I couldn’t see what the fellow was wearing. But he had his arm around her shoulder, holding her as they strolled toward me. I kept still, when he got near enough for me to hear, I had another one of those jolts.

“... make an end to it, once and for all, Marge,” he was saying, “then we’ll get married.”