Man-Trap

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Fausta’s story was brief and not very enlightening. In response to my supposed request, she had arrived at the Sheridan just before ten, dismissed her cab and asked the head waiter for me. The head waiter informed her Mr. Moon had phoned he would be a few minutes late and left instructions for her to take a table for both of them.

At ten in the morning a table was no problem, for the cocktail lounge was built to accommodate two hundred, there were less than thirty customers in the place, and half of these were at the bar. Fausta chose the corner table where we were sitting now.

A few minutes later she was quietly smoking a cigarette while she waited, when a waiter set in front of her what seemed to be a rum and coke, then moved off to another table before she could speak. She looked at it in surprise, then simply let it stand there until she was able to attract the waiter’s attention.

When she finally managed to signal him over, she said. “You have made a mistake. I ordered no drink.”

“It’s on the gentleman at the bar,” he said. “Mr. Moon.” He turned to point out Mr. Moon, failed to find him and said, “He must have stepped to the men’s room.”

Still more puzzled than annoyed, Fausta sniffed the drink, detected the odor of rum and instructed the waiter to take it away and bring her a plain coke. While she was not in the least suspicious, and assumed I had actually sent over the drink, then disappeared into the wash room and would be along in a minute, the murderer’s simple plot was foiled by his lack of knowledge of Fausta.

Fausta never touched anything alcoholic before one in the afternoon.

The waiter removed the rum and coke, but apparently decided not to toss it down the drain. Since it had been paid for, he took it into the liquor storeroom and tossed it down himself.

Fausta of course did not know this at the time. Her story ended with the waiter taking away the drink. When customers at the bar set up an excited clamoring a few minutes later, she had no idea what caused the clamor. She did learn from the general conversation someone had been found dead in the storeroom, apparently of a heart attack, but did not connect it with her rejected drink, or for that matter even know the dead man was her waiter until after the police arrived.

“We got here fast,” Day said to me wearily. “We were already on our way because of what you said when you tore put of my office. The guy hadn’t been dead five minutes, and the management hadn’t even gotten around to calling us when we took the joint by storm. We weren’t in time to prevent half the customers from taking a powder the minute they smelled murder though. The poisoner with them, most likely.”

“It was poison, was it?” I asked.

“The medic hazards a guess at potassium cyanide, though he can’t say for sure until after an autopsy. He thinks he got a faint whiff of bitter almonds, though rum and coke is a pretty good cover for the smell. The taste too, for that matter. The symptoms are hard to tell from an ordinary heart attack: instant death, cyanosis. If he hadn’t rolled in looking for murder, it probably would have passed as a heart attack.” He scratched his long nose and burst out irritably, “Half my men will be tied up the next week checking drug stores.”

“What’s the bartender say?” I asked. “Maybe he remembers who ordered Fausta’s rum coke.”

It developed Day had not yet questioned the bartender. Or anyone else either. He had been in the place only about twenty minutes before I arrived, and only a minute or two before I walked in had gotten the medical examiner’s opinion that it might be a cyanide death.

He called Hannegan over from the other side of the room and told him to bring over the bartender.

The barkeep was a sad-faced man in his late fifties who had looked across the bar at so much human idiocy during his lifetime, nothing could upset him very much, including murder. He had no idea who had ordered the rum and coke. Vaguely he recalled mixing one a short time before the waiter’s death, but being alone behind the bar, and with over a dozen customers plus two waiters to take care of, he could not remember to whom he gave it.

“I never look at their faces anyway unless they make conversation,” he said sadly. “I think it was one of the customers instead of a waiter, but I’m not even sure of that.”

The dead waiter’s name was Harold Rosenthal, he was forty-four years old and a bachelor, the bartender informed us. As far as he knew, the man had no living relatives.

The surviving waiter knew even less. In fact he knew nothing at all.

Nor did any of the approximately one dozen remaining customers who had not been smart enough to scoot off before the police arrived. No one at all recalled even seeing the bartender mix a rum and coke, let alone remembering who had received it.

The head waiter was a little help. The phone call from “Mr. Moon” had come to the bar phone, and he had taken it. The voice had not impressed him as particularly distinctive, either high or low, soft or harsh, but he felt he could identify it if he heard it again.

“The invisible man!” the inspector grated disgustedly. “Commits a murder in front of thirty people and nobody even sees him!”

“We know one thing about him anyway,” I offered.

He stared at me. “What?”

“He was well enough acquainted with Fausta to know her favorite drink is rum and coke, but not well enough to know she never drinks in the morning.”

Day’s expression turned disgusted. “That narrows it down to the fifty thousand people who have stopped at El Patio sometime or other and may have seen her order a drink at the bar.”

I changed the subject by telling Warren Day about the blue sedan and my heavy-set, flat-faced abductor.

“So that’s where you were,” he commented. “Riding in the park while I rushed to the rescue of your girl friend.”

I forbore reminding him Fausta’s drinking habits had saved her, and not the in-inspectors’ rushing, as he would have been about ten minutes late had she accepted the drink. “I don’t pretend to understand it,” I said. “But the news about Fausta being in a killer’s trap changed the guy’s mind about me entirely. All of a sudden he just seemed to lose interest and took off for the Sheridan.”

“Nobody with a flat face turned up here,” the inspector said. He looked at Mouldy Greene. “Nobody I didn’t know, anyway.”

Fausta said, “I do not know anyone of that description.”

“Me neither,” Mouldy injected. “A guy as ugly as you describe, you’d be bound to remember him.”

I did not run Fausta and Mouldy back to El Patio immediately. It was noon when we got away from the Sheridan, and the three of us stopped for lunch at a Johnson’s restaurant a few blocks beyond the Sheridan.

During lunch I firmly instructed Fausta concerning her immediate future.

“You’re not playing hostess at El Patio until this killer is laid by the heels,” I told her. “Wandering around among two hundred diners every night, any one of which might be the killer, would be sticking your head on the block. You’ve got two choices. You may go to jail for protection, or have me move in as a bodyguard.”

“Move in?” she asked interestedly. “In my apartment?”

“Strictly as a business arrangement. The day bed in your front room will suit fine. But I want you to understand ahead of time, it’s going to be up to you to arrange your life to suit mine. I’m on this case and I can’t drop it in order to follow you around. You’re going to have to follow me. Every day, ail day long, until I tuck you in at night. You’ll have to forget managing El Patio.”

“I can run the joint,” Mouldy said.

Fausta looked at him. “It will run itself for a few days,” she said firmly. “You just stick to your regular job.”

“Then you agree to those terms?” I asked.

“It will be interesting to have you around twenty-four hours a day like an unemployed husband. Maybe I will become bored with you and begin to appreciate Barney Seldon more.”

After lunch I drove over to my apartment, packed a weekend bag and strapped my P-38 under my arm. Then the three of us rode out to El Patio and I moved into my new home.