Dead of Night

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.

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.