Killer with a Key

CHAPTER 3

Johnny glanced at the clock over the bell captain's desk in the recessed niche between the elevators as he emerged into the semi-darkened lobby. Five after three. He crossed directly to the marbled registration desk.

His final try upstairs had been unable to get a word out of Ellen. She had sunk bonelessly upon the bed in the room to which he had taken her and had turned her face to the wall. Please, she had said in reply to all his prodding. Please. Not now. Let me rest. Let me think. Please.

A hundred irritated questions had crowded up behind his teeth, but he had kept the teeth locked. Let her settle down. It had better be soon, though; whatever it was that had scared her was no damn joke. Four slugs in the door against which they'd been standing was no joke at all.

He leaned over the registration counter, craning to look for Vic Barnes, the night front-desk man. He slapped an open palm down on the smooth surface. “Vic!”

“Yo, John.” Vic ambled up from behind the cashier's wicket, threading his way along the narrow aisle which separated the rear of the counter from the mail rack. He looked at Johnny inquiringly. Vic was a stocky, middle-aged man in a clerk's black alpaca jacket; he had a smooth, round face and pink cheeks with a glossy sheen upon the skin that made it seem waxed. He had sparse sandy hair rapidly turning gray, combed straight back from a high forehead, and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles low on the bridge of his nose. It was an easygoing face; Vic was an easygoing man.

“Couldn't see you back there,” Johnny told him. “Listen. Block out 629 for me.”

Vic pursed full lips. “Fun and games again? When you gonna grow up, John?” He shook his head doubtfully, but he was already reaching for the room rack, pencil in hand.

“I'll have her out of there by daylight. Are we going fishing Thursday morning with Mike? He's already asked me three times.”

“Tell him yes, then,” Vic replied promptly. “It's his gas he's going to burn.” He reached for his phone as it rang. “Front desk, Barnes. Oh, hello there. Still up? You should — who? Why, no, I don't-”

Johnny turned away and walked back to his bell-captain's desk. He removed his big flashlight from the lower drawer and re-crossed the lobby to the telephone switchboard at the far end of the registration desk. He leaned his elbows on the little gate that set the board off from the lobby proper and looked in at Sally Fontaine, its headphoned night operator. “Hi, Ma.”

His voice brought her head up, and she smiled out at him. She nodded at the light in his hand. “Prowling again?”

“Yeah. Paul go out?”

“Just for coffee.”

“Tell him where he can find me when he gets back.”

She inclined her head as the board buzzed. She pulled a plug and the buzzing stopped, and she looked out at him again. She was a small girl, almost painfully thin. She might have been thirty. Her nose was short and tiptilted, and her brown hair was an indeterminate shade very nearly justifying the adjective mousy. The brown eyes and the too generous mouth smiled easily and warmly.

Johnny spoke softly into the lobby's hush. “You comin' up in the mornin', Ma? Business meetin'.”

“A likely story, Johnny Killain.”

“Surest thing you ever heard. Business meetin' to consider the settin' up of a joint venture, the deal open only to the subscribin' partners.” He grinned at her. “Who're you 'n me. You a customer?”

“Any capital required?”

“You're totin' your assets, kid.”

“I am? What's the valuation?”

“The assessor's report isn't in yet, but I got a feelin' it's high grade ore. You gonna see me in the mornin', Ma?”

She smiled, and the severe planes of the narrow face lightened remarkably. She looked like a different person. “A girl could get a reputation, seeing you in the mornings.”

“She could earn it, too.”

“You don't seem to manage your business affairs very discreetly. With a new manager around here-”

“Hell with him. You be there.”

She smiled again, and waved as he turned. He walked across to the wide flight of marbled stairs leading up to the mezzanine and started up. The hotel had a night watchman, but he was not a hotel employee; he was from a protective association, and he had other stops in the block. Years ago Johnny had formed the habit of making a swing himself around the mezzanine and the ground floor, usually around three in the morning when things had quieted down. Once in a while a drunk fell asleep upstairs in the lounge, or one of the stores on the mezzanine forgot to lock up at closing time.

It was not a large hotel; four hundred and twenty-five rooms, give or take a few always in the process of redecoration. It was not a new hotel; a slightly shabby comfort had its own attraction for a number of people who preferred a certain quiet dullness to a bright and shining newness with its accompanying sharp edges. The hotel was understaffed, like most such, particularly on the night side. Johnny, Vic, Paul, and Sally had had it to themselves as a regular crew for seven or eight years, with occasional and inconsequential help from part-time bellboys and elevator operators.

A good many years ago it had been a first-class hotel, but the neighborhood had changed and the theatrical people who had once patronized it extensively had now moved across Broadway. Because of its midtown location it still had a steady businessman clientele and a number of permanents, some of whom had been there for years.

Johnny swung up on the landing, past the executive offices, and turned right. He hurried as he swept the bulls'-eye flash around the dim shadows of the interior lounge; he wanted to get back upstairs. He could easily hear the echoing sound of his heels in the quiet as he walked down the far side of the mezzanine and tried the doors of the travel bureau, the barber shop, the beauty shop, the haberdashery, the theatre ticket agency and the public stenographer's office. Satisfied, he descended the same flight of stairs to the main floor lobby and cut back underneath through the muraled swinging doors which led into the bar, dark except for the night light.

He walked down its long expanse and removed a key from a clip on the band of his wrist watch. He unlocked the door at the far end of the bar leading into the kitchen and, flashlight in hand, made a quick circuit of the cavernously gloomy area whose long stainless-steel counters sprang to glistening life under the probing beam of the light. He tried the fire door at the back end of the huge room, the padlocked doors on the walk-in boxes and the hooked catches on the windows, and returning to his starting point let himself out and re-locked the door.

Back in the lobby he returned to the registration desk and found Paul behind it, idly turning the pages of the early edition. “Vic go out? How soon's he due back?”

“Any time.” Paul glanced at his watch. “He's a little overdue right now. Another couple of minutes, probably.”

Johnny hesitated, and Paul looked at him inquiringly. Paul, the elevator operator, was a slender man, four or five years older than Johnny's thirty-five; his hair was dark and slicked down closely to a small skull. He had a stolid, unimaginative face, but a firm mouth and chin; Paul was reliable. “I want you to cover for me,” Johnny explained. “I need to run upstairs a few minutes.”

“So go ahead,” Paul said at once, folding up his paper. “Vic'll be back in a minute. I'm not likely to get any conventions to check in till he gets here.”

“It's quiet enough,” Johnny agreed. “Okay. If you need me ring 629. It's not on the board.”

Paul nodded. As he turned away from the desk Johnny reflected that one of Paul's primary virtues was that he needed no diagrams.

Johnny stepped out into the sixth-floor corridor after anchoring the cab of the service elevator with a slab of wood, and a flash of white at the end of the hall caught his eye. He looked more closely and discovered a white kitten galloping in spurting dashes, twin white paws batting at a dustball. “What the hell?” Johnny was surprised to find that he had said it aloud. There couldn't be two white kittens in this place. Not on the sixth floor, anyway. This kitten should have been behind the door of 629, and since it wasn't something was wrong.

He advanced on the kitten, which wheeled to confront him. When Johnny was half a dozen paces away the small back arched slowly, and the white fur seemed to swell enormously, especially around the neck. A long, surprisingly loud hiss accompanied this display of defiance, and Johnny laughed as he dropped to his knees. “You need a new matchmaker, white stuff; you're givin' away too much weight.” He extended a finger, slowly and steadily, and the kitten watched its approach, eyes of an unexpectedly bright blue fearlessly studying the problem. Johnny ran the finger right up to the ridiculous whiskers, and in movement too quick to follow the kitten turned its head and seized the finger in its mouth.

It was not a bite; Johnny could feel the impression of the needle-like little fangs, but he knew it was just a holding action while the kitten debated the seriousness of the assault. With his left hand he scooped up the small body, and the fangs closed down. Johnny stood up and worked his finger free, and he and Sassy looked down at the two bright drops of blood which dotted its surface. “Okay, tiger; you won a battle, but you lost the war. It's happened to heavyweights. Now let's go see how you got out here.”

With the kitten riding his arm he turned back down the corridor to 629. He could see that the door was tightly closed as he approached it, and his feeling of unease increased. He couldn't imagine Ellen Saxon opening the door of that room to anyone in the mood in which he had left her, yet somehow the kitten had gotten out into the hall.

At the door he fumbled for his pass key. Then the door opened inward suddenly as he reached for the lock, and Vic Barnes stood teetering on the threshold, breast-to-breast with Johnny.

Vic's face was ghastly, perspiration streamed down the faded, round cheeks, and the eyes were all whites. Vic's mouth opened convulsively, but no sound emerged; he half turned to look back over his shoulder, and rubberlegged a sideways step as Johnny impatiently pushed past him and inside.

A stride beyond the door he stopped in his tracks.

Ellen Saxon lay on the bed where he had left her; for a long moment Johnny stared in disbelief at the twisted limbs, the outflung arm with which she had sought in vain to protect herself, the so-well-remembered face that was now a death mask of horror. A puffed, blue, strangulated horror.

He drew a harsh breath and crossed the room in a lunge. He felt for a pulse and dropped the limp wrist hopelessly. There was no pulse. Ellen-he still couldn't believe it.

He fought his way back up to the surface; he couldn't seem to get off dead center mentally. He forced himself to lean forward and look more closely at Ellen's outthrust arm and hand; he avoided looking at her face. When he turned to Vic he didn't recognize his own voice. “What were you doing up here, Vic?”

Vic never even heard him. The stocky man had dropped down on a chair just inside the door and had retreated to a private world of his own. He was bent nearly double in the chair, with the lower half of his face cradled in his hands and the protruding eyes staring glassily.

Johnny stepped into the bathroom and turned on the cold water. He grabbed a towel from the rack, soaked it in the running water, wrung it out hard, folded it three times lengthwise and brought it out and handed it to Vic, who plunged his face into it. Johnny was already making the round trip to wet down another towel; by the third trip Vic was back on his feet and Johnny had a hand on his shoulder. “Why did you come up here, Vic?”

The waxen-faced man swallowed hard. A hand crept up and removed his glasses, absently stuffing them into the breast pocket of his jacket. He had trouble finding his voice; it seemed to come from a long distance. “I–I can't tell you.”

“What the hell do you mean you can't tell me!” Johnny rapped back at him. Without the glasses the deathly pale features looked more defenseless than before. He looked at the water marks from the wet towels on the shoulders of the black alpaca jacket, and he tried to keep his voice down. “Look, Vic; this is Johnny. I don't think you did it. I know you better than that. I know you didn't do it, but I also need to know a few other things. Why did you come up here?”

Vic stared at him dumbly.

Johnny fought for patience. “How much time you think we got, Vic? This is important. I've worked with you for seven years. Fifty times I've asked you to block out a room for me. This is the first time you ever came upstairs. Why?”

The stocky man's voice was a leaden monotone. “The p-police will say I did it.”

It brought Johnny up short. They would, too, if Vic didn't make any more sense than he had up to now. If they don't think you did it, he added silently to himself. He had to find out what Vic knew before the police got there, or he wasn't going to find out anything at all.

He pushed Vic back down into the chair again, and the spaniel eyes stared up at him. “Are you listening, Vic? Do you hear me?”

A nod, and again the hard swallowing movement of the throat.

“The police are going to ask you the same thing I did, Vic.” Johnny leaned over him. “What are you going to tell them?”

Silence. And then Vic's head came up, and a fleeting impression of an expression passed over the damp, ashen face. “I'll tell them-” He hesitated, and his voice strengthened a little with the necessity for conveying his thought. “I'll tell them I-had a date with her. Yes. Date with her… that's it.”

Johnny restrained a wild desire to laugh. “Date with her? You? For God's sake, Vic-”

But Vic had gone away again. With the head bowed the slack-lipped mumble was scarcely understandable. “-date with her.”

Johnny's nails bit into his palms. Time. No time. No time for this damned foolishness. Somewhere inside him a spring was winding down, tighter and tighter. He leaned forward again. “Vic!” He tried to put his own desperate sense of urgency into his voice. “You know they're gonna take you in if you tell them that?” He stared down at Vic's bowed head; he wasn't getting through. He aimed his hard voice down at the withdrawn man. “Do you know who she was, Vic?”

And Vic's head came up; again the voice was a little stronger. “Yes. Ellen Saxon.”

Johnny felt winded, suspended in space and time. How did Vic know Ellen Saxon? How had he known she was here in this room? How did- He shook his head. No time. No time at all. He tried to capitalize on the breakthrough. “Vic. Look at me. Did you know that Ellen Saxon had been married to me?”

The whites overran Vic's eyes. “Mar-ried?” The halting voice made two distinct syllables of the one word; before Johnny's eyes the bones of the round face seemed to dissolve, and the facial flesh slackened. The stocky man pitched sideways from his chair, and Johnny had to lunge hard to catch him before he hit the floor.

The jolting grab as his arms absorbed Vic's weight released Johnny from his own inertia. He lifted strongly, settling Vic back in the chair and propping him up. He glanced quickly around the room; he had a lot to do, and he wasn't thinking clearly.

He grabbed up his torn uniform jacket from the floor, the jacket he had thrown over Ellen's shoulders out in the street in that short time ago that now seemed like such a long time ago. He scooped up the wet towels, and looked for the kitten. He picked up the small white body from the floor where it was playing with the tassels on the bedspread and tucked it under his arm.

In the corridor a dozen strides took him to the door of 615, his own room. He opened it, dropped jacket, towels, and kitten inside, and closed and locked it. Back at the door of 629 he saw that Vic was again in the land of the living, and his voice was hard. “On your feet, Vic. Got to get out of here.”

In the doorway, with Vic already in the corridor, Johnny stopped and turned for a final searing look at the bed. Repressed emotion rioted within him, but he held it down. Savagely he closed the door from the outside and propelled Vic down the hall. Vic moved like an automaton, with Johnny's hand at his elbow.

They moved like a team off the elevator into the lobby, and Paul looked up from the registration desk. “You found him. I was beginning-” Paul broke off when he saw Johnny's face. His glance slid off to Vic, hesitated, and returned to Johnny.

“Got a bad one, Paul,” Johnny told him. He glanced around the deserted lobby. “Get Sally up here. We got work to do.”

Paul silently slithered down the narrow passageway behind the marbled counter and was back almost immediately with Sally. She looked from Johnny to Vic, and her thin features turned anxious.

“All right,” Johnny said abruptly. He tried to sort out his thoughts. “Listen close; I only got time to say this once. We have a dead woman up in 629. Her name is Ellen Saxon. She used to be-”

“Oh, Johnny, no!” Sally's shocked exclamation halted his staccato recital. “Ellen? Dead?”

“Murdered.” The word seemed to reverberate through the stillness of the lobby. “She used to be my wife,” he explained to Paul. No need to explain to Sally. Sally was the one person in the world who knew how Johnny Killain had felt about Ellen Saxon. “I put her in the room about an hour ago, unregistered. Vic found her there about fifteen minutes ago. Approximately.”

Sally's hand was at her throat. “Oh, Johnny-”

He continued harshly. “We're going to cut our losses a little before we call the police. We'll register her in, now. Gimme a blank, Paul.”

He took the registration card and handed it to Sally. “Need a woman's handwriting. Put down 'Ellen Saxon'.”

She wrote swiftly, and looked up at him. “Address?”

Johnny grunted. Address? That was a bad one. He didn't know. Where “Four Twelve Darby Court.” Johnny's eyes swiveled to Vic, who had said it. You couldn't tell from looking at that sodden, wrung-out face that Vic had said anything at all, Johnny reflected. Vic looked back at him, but it was a question if he saw him.

“Put it down,” Johnny told Sally. “I don't know if it's right or not. I don't know how he knows, if it is. I don't know why he went up there. There's too damn much I don't know. Put it down. Paul?”

“Yes, Johnny?”

“Get me the logbook. And your screwdriver.” He picked up the little screwdriver Paul laid down on the counter before he moved out from behind it and reached for the cord on the electric time clock. He pulled the plug, unfastened the two screws that held the metal cover in place on the clock, and slid it off. He turned to Paul at his elbow with the chronological listing of roomings and room service in the logbook and opened it to the current page. He almost smiled. “First break we've had tonight. Only half a dozen entries on this page, and they're all on this shift. Paul, you get this page out of here completely, and be careful no one can tell a page has been removed. On the new page write back in again the entries that were in your handwriting, leaving spaces for me to do the same. Leave me one extra space at the right place for me to enter Ellen Saxon as roomed at two-forty-five a.m. Got it?”

“Got it.” Paul's tone was brisk; he was already slipping his knife from his pocket.

Johnny turned back to the time clock. With the speed born of practice he jiggered the dial with his screwdriver and set it back for a 2:38 a.m. punch, plugged the clock back in and punched the back of the card Sally had filled out. He handed it to her. “Fix up the room carbons for this rack and yours, huh?” He could hear her at the typewriter as he unplugged the time clock again, reset it correctly after a glance at his watch and tested it with a blank card. He nodded, tore up the card, slid the metal cover back on and screwed it down tightly. On a bet one time he had done the whole thing in four minutes.

Paul pushed the logbook over to him, and Johnny reached for his pen. He looked across the counter at Sally. “All set? Call the police, and put Paul through to them. Paul, you say I just called you from upstairs.”

Sally's features looked pinched. “What are you going to tell them?”

Johnny shrugged. “The truth, except this little corner we just cut here. I'd rather tell them I found her, but look at Vic. How long d'you think it would stand up once they started to talk to him?” He could see them looking at Vic, then quickly away. “The hell of it is they're a cinch to take him in.” He picked up his pen again and started to write, then paused as he looked up. “Paul, after you talk to the police call in a couple of the boys that live closest. Get 'em in here fast. We're gonna have the law kneelin' on our chests the balance of this shift, and we'll need a little extra help till the day crowd comes on.”

Sally moved down to the switchboard, and Paul again circled behind the counter and picked up his phone. Vic stood, motionless, and stared off into space. Johnny made the last entry in the logbook, closed it and returned it to the bell captain's desk. He ran back over the routine in his mind-that should do it. Ellen Saxon could now properly be accounted for so far as the hotel and the police were concerned, and he would not be held up by tedious executive office and police inquiries about a registry irregularity in his own effort to find the murderer of Ellen Saxon.

He drew a deep breath, and his hands clenched. He felt as though he had been running down a long, dark street. He looked down at his hands, and with an awkward movement forcibly relaxed their knotted rigidity. He turned away from the desk.

Paul was hanging up his phone as Johnny returned to him. “Okay?” Paul nodded silently. “Good. Keep an eye on the switchboard a few minutes, will you? I need to talk to Sally.”

He continued on down to the little gate. “Let's go upstairs a minute, Ma. You might have the answers to a coupla questions I need answered.”

She slipped off the headphone and stood up. He held the gate open for her and followed her across the lobby onto the service elevator. “Johnny-” she began tentatively, and he shook his head.

“Post mortems upstairs, Ma,” he said, and his mouth twisted at the unintentional double entendre. He shot the cab aloft in a silent rush.