Dead of Night

Chapter sixteen: Lowdown on a Casanova

Lurking is something I’m clumsy at. I wouldn’t look right in one of those cloak-and-dagger outfits. Besides I doubt if espionage agents get much dope by sneaking around in the shadows.

So I used my cigarette lighter; it must have showed up about like a firefly against that immense, dark lawn. But they saw it, stopped their intimate chatter, clicked on a light bracketed from a stanchion of the pier.

“Dow? That you?” She had an agreeably soft voice; I couldn’t tell whether the curious breathless quality was her normal way of speaking, or whether she was afraid.

I put an inquiry into my “Mrs. Lanerd?” though of course I’d seen her often in the Calypso Room with Mr. Giveaway.

Glowing — that was the word for Margery Lanerd. Not beautiful. Blue eyes, an electric blue that blazed hotly under the stark brightness of the pier light. A red-and-freckles, tomboyish, sunburnished face with a mobile mouth and expressive eyebrows that seemed to be always in motion. The chestnut mane, caught around her forehead with a blue ribbon, sleeking down to bare shoulders, reminded me of coppery colts in the paddock sunlight at Belmont. She held herself tense; her left hand pressed against her slim, bare midriff. Keeping her emotions under tight control.

“Did you want to see me?” Fear, close to the surface.

I said I’d driven out from New York to see her husband; the servant had told me Mister Lanerd wasn’t home; could she suggest where I might get hold of him?

No. She could not. What was my business with him?

“Saw your husband at the Plaza Royale tonight, Mrs. Lanerd, I’m Gilbert Vine, security chief at the hotel, and a little matter has come up—” I left it vague enough to cover anything.

She drew in her breath sharply. To hide her surprise or give herself time to think she introduced the husky customer in slacks and screamy-striped blazer.

“Jefford MacGregory, Mister Vine. Mister MacGregory is with Lanerd, Kenson and Fullbright.”

“Oh — Stack O’ Jack Show.” I smiled as if I’d never missed the program, knew all about him. It wasn’t hard to make a couple of close guesses about him.

MacGregory was thick-necked and bull-chested with big-muscled arms and legs; there was a slight indication of a paunch that said he did himself well at the board. He had a huge dome head, slightly bald in front but making up for it by a black spade beard. His face was Falstaffian with round, ingenuous eyes and a mouth that could have been humorous. It wasn’t, right then.

“You’re not the one who called me up — at the studio?”

I said no, I wasn’t. But the other guy and I wanted to locate Mister Lanerd for the same reason.

Marge Lanerd’s breathlessness was even more noticeable. “He telephoned me, too. Said there’d been some trouble.”

“Yair.” I couldn’t decide whether either of them knew about the murder. “Trouble. About one of Miss Millett’s guards.”

“Roffis?” She made it a question.

“He was killed.” No beating around the bush. I gave it to them cold. Everything except my talk with Ruth Moore and the cryptic Seven-for-a-secret business. “I’m working for the hotel. I have to clear Auguste. Miss Millett probably saw the killer; that would have been why she asked the guard to hurry into her bedroom, just before the murderer ran out of it and bumped into our room-service captain. You see why it’s important to find her. Fast.”

MacGregory muttered, “She’s probably out of the country by now.”

We walked up the slope to the chateau. She kept her hand on the producer’s shoulder.

“Don’t get mixed up in it, Jeff. You don’t have to. You run along.”

He said sharply, “How could I be more involved than I am! I’m not going to leave.”

“Jeff! Jeff, dear!” She shook him to get him to look at her. “I’d rather you did.”

“No.” He was stubborn. “I’m going to sit in on this hand. I’ve been dealt out too often.”

I was impatient to get the low-down on Lanerd, quickly. These two, batting it back and forth, didn’t seem very important. Hot-blooded youth making unsuccessful passes at neglected wife of gadabout boss. Kind of affair that goes on all the time. Not quite the way this one was going, though.

We crossed a flagged terrace, entered a long music room with a vaulted ceiling that went up two stories. The butler appeared; there was polite chitchat about drinks.

I asked for a rum sour, very sour. The producer ordered a Rob Roy and didn’t bother to explain how it was made; he’d been there quite a lot, evidently. When the butler left, Mrs. Lanerd went to the grand piano by the picture window looking out over the bay.

She played as she talked, softly. I don’t know what the music was; it would have sounded all right in our Gold Room at thé musicale. The drinks came in.

She wasn’t surprised there’d been trouble at the skater’s suite; Marge herself might have caused it. But probably Jeff had been right; Tildy Millett would be in Bermuda or on a plane to Europe by now. Dow would undoubtedly be with her. The piece she was playing was pretty doleful.

“That,” I said, “will make it look as if he killed Roffis.”

She admitted that to anyone who knew Dow it might look as if he was trying to help the girl get beyond the reach of the authorities. Not that her husband might not have gone abroad with Tildy even if there’d been no need for protecting her. They had planned a continental elopement — she played a little louder so I wouldn’t notice the tremors in her voice — Marge had known about it for some time. That was why she’d gone to the Plaza Royale that afternoon, to make one last attempt to scare the skater away from her husband.

There was another interlude on the high keys, clashing discords. I asked Mrs. Lanerd if she’d had any luck with Miss Millett.

She couldn’t say. Marge had been cold-blooded about it, had warned Tildy that plenty of girls had tried to break up Marge’s home and none had succeeded. Marge had been a show girl too long not to know how hard it was to hold a good man. Even when he wasn’t the good man she’d thought he was when she married him.

“You couldn’t get anywhere with your husband — no reconciliation?”

Reconciliation, of course. The usual scene, the same old promises. She knew better than to believe them. He was putty in the hands of the woman he happened to be with at the moment. So she said. She’d threatened to kill Tildy, indeed she had. At that point, Roffis — who hadn’t been at all sure he should have let her in the suite, anyway — put her out. Deep rumblings down at the left of the keyboard.

She’d been very upset, very excited, but she hadn’t said a single thing she didn’t mean from the bottom of her heart. Tildy had mentioned a possible divorce; Marge had scorned the idea. She knew all about her husband’s playing around; had long ago determined that she’d rather have a part of Dow Lanerd than all of any other man. And would go to absolutely any lengths to keep him. At least she’d accomplished one thing, she had thought. The guard hadn’t been aware of the elopement plans; as he pushed Marge out into the corridor he’d told her, sotto voce, not to worry; the District Attorney would see to it Tildy Millett didn’t get on any outward-bound plane.

Marge had counted on that slim consolation. But even then, as she left the hotel, it occurred to her perhaps Tildy also would fight for the man she wanted. If the person she had to battle had been Roffis — well — A crashing crescendo.

MacGregory supplied the crusher.

“I know Tildy killed him.”

How did he know?

“She was coming unstuck when she got to the studio tonight.” He tried to get Mrs. Lanerd away from the piano, but she kept right on pounding those tremendous chords. “I didn’t think she’d be able to do the show at all. She cried, stumbled over chairs as if she’d been in a car accident and was suffering from shock. I couldn’t catch all the things she was moaning while I was trying to calm her. But one thing I did hear, good and clear.”

Marge let her hands drop from the keys. The room still echoed from the thundering piano.

“She cried, ‘I had to do it! I had to do it, Jeff! I couldn’t give him up! I couldn’t!’”