The D.A. Breaks a Seal

13

The Palace Hotel at Flora Vista was a three-story frame building surrounded by huge shade trees. Its long, wide verandas, cupolas and ornamental balconies bore silent witness to a bygone school of architecture.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when Selby and Sylvia Martin entered the high-ceilinged lobby. The lights had already been dimmed, and only an area back of the desk was brightly lighted.

The monotonous repetition of a question which had hitherto been futile gave Selby’s voice a flat, expressionless quality as he asked his routine question. “Sometime today did a woman check in here, dressed in black, around sixty to sixty-five years of age, hair gray but not entirely white, dark, deep-set eyes, and perhaps wearing a white gardenia corsage? This is Miss Martin of the Madison City Clarion and we’re trying to locate...”

“Guess you mean Hattie Irwin, don’t you?”

“Registered from some place in Kansas?” Selby asked with a sudden surge of expression in his voice.

“Empalma, Kansas, that’s right.”

Selby struggled to keep excitement from his voice. “We’d like to talk with her. Is she in her room?”

“In her room and probably gone to bed,” the clerk said. “She was down in the lobby about an hour ago and said it was about her bedtime.”

“Give her a ring,” Selby said, and then added, “It’s important.”

The man hesitated a moment, then plugged in a line, very briefly pressed the key, and waited.

Within a second or two he said, “Mrs. Irwin, there are two people in the lobby who would like to see you... Yes... A woman and a man... They say it’s important... Very well, I’ll tell them.”

He pulled out the plug and said, “She said to wait five minutes and then to come up. Three-o-two.”

Selby nodded his thanks. He could feel Sylvia Martin’s fingers pressing his arm just above the elbow.

“Happen to have a man here, also from Kansas?” he asked. “Someone who registered today. About...”

“No one else from Kansas registered today. We only had two men. One of them is a traveling salesman from San Francisco; the other one is a man from Denver. I’m quite well acquainted with the traveling salesman. The Denver man is strange.”

“Somewhere past fifty, rather stooped...”

“No, he’s about thirty-five, dark hair, gray eyes...”

“Guess he isn’t our man,” Selby said. “We can probably find out what we want from Mrs. Irwin.”

Selby strolled away from the desk and guided Sylvia Martin to a leather-lined chair in the dim recesses of the huge lobby, where they would be out of earshot of the clerk.

Sylvia perched herself on the rounded arm of the chair. “Gosh, Doug, I’m too excited to sit down and relax. Won’t it be a swell break if we can get something that will tie Carr in with that murder and...”

“Take it easy,” Selby cautioned. “All we know right now is that we’ve acted on a hypothesis and have achieved a first objective by a process of dead reckoning. But we don’t know what lies back of that first objective. We’re going to have to use our eyes, our ears and our heads.”

“Well, at least we’re going to find out what Carr had to say to her. That’s going to be worth something. We’ve quit speculating on cold clues and have hit a really hot trail.”

“And where it’s going to lead is anyone’s guess,” Selby said. “Come on, let’s go up. By the time we get there it will at least have approached the five minutes we were supposed to wait.”

They entered the automatic elevator and rattled and swayed up to the third floor. Selby knocked on the door of room 302.

Hattie Irwin had evidently been in bed when the telephone rang, but she had gone about her preparations to receive visitors with all of the proprieties carefully observed. She had utilized the short interval to make the bed, smooth down the counterpane. She had put on a dress, although her feet were encased in bedroom slippers, and her gray hair was smoothed primly back from her forehead. Her deep-set black eyes regarded her two visitors appraisingly and then lighted as they regarded Doug Selby.

“Well, I’ll declare!” she exclaimed.

Selby smiled. “I was on the train with you, Mrs. Irwin.”

“I remember you. I noticed you two or three times — a nice-looking figure in your uniform. I have a grandson in the service. Just a private, but he’s a nice boy, a mighty nice boy. I haven’t seen him in his uniform, but I’ll bet he looks really handsome. You’re a — a captain?”

“A major,” Selby said. “And this is Miss Sylvia Martin. She’s a newspaper reporter.”

“Well, well, a newspaper reporter, eh? Won’t you sit down. How did you happen to find me here, and what do you want?”

“Just a little information,” Selby said. “You see, Miss Martin is on the newspaper at Madison City, and you got off the train at Madison City.”

“That’s right. That was this morning about ten-forty, I believe it was. We were supposed to be in there at ten thirty-two, but we were eight and a half minutes late.”

“That’s right,” Selby said, smiling at Sylvia Martin. “You have friends in Madison City, Mrs. Irwin?”

“Land sakes, how would I have any friends in Madison City? This is the first time in my life I was ever out of Kansas except once I went to Iowa.”

“But someone met you at the train?” Selby prompted.

“Oh yes. That was a man from the touring agency. Well, guess he wasn’t either. I guess there was some mistake made, when you come right down to it.”

“Did you get his name?” Selby asked.

She said, “No I didn’t. You see, there was some sort of a mixup.”

Sylvia Martin’s voice was kindly. “Could you tell me what it was, Mrs. Irwin?”

“Well,” the woman said, “you see when I won this trip to California...”

“Won a trip to California?” Sylvia interrupted.

She nodded her head, her manner showing intense satisfaction. “Just like rolling off a log.”

“Suppose you tell us first what happened when you arrived in Madison City,” Selby said. “I believe you pinned on a white gardenia corsage just before you got off the train, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“And that was to enable you to meet someone? It was to identify you in some way?”

“That’s right. A man from the tour was to meet me there. Seems like there were two of us on the train, but I didn’t know the other man was there. He’d been traveling up in the day coach. Land sakes, I don’t know how a body could travel that way — but that was the sort of trip he’d won and I guess he liked it better than staying home. He didn’t make as high a rating as I did, I guess. They tell me I was mighty near perfect — right around ninety-eight percent, I think the man said.”

Selby exchanged glances with Sylvia Martin. “Perhaps you’d better tell us about this contest, Mrs. Irwin.”

“There wasn’t anything to it. It was one of those things that come in the mail. It didn’t cost anything to try, there was a stamped address envelope already enclosed, and all you had to do was to answer some questions and see how many faces you could find concealed in a drawing. You know, a picture of some trees and a farm and a wagon, and you’d turn it upside down and you’d find a woman’s face in part of the wagon, or a man’s face in the trees.”

Her index finger moved in little tracing motions as she enthusiastically recounted her triumph, drawing imaginary pictures in the air.

“And then what happened?” Selby asked.

“Well, I answered the questions and picked out the faces and sent it in. I didn’t know whether I’d done so good, but the next thing I knew, the man from the company called me up and he seemed all excited. He asked me to come to meet him at the hotel and told me I’d won a first prize — a trip to California with all expenses paid. But I had to leave almost right away because of trouble with Pullman reservations. You know, I’ve been sort of worrying about that.”

“About what?”

“Well, with the way travel is now there isn’t supposed to be any nonessential travel and this company seemed a little worried about that. They’d fixed up the contest some time ago, before travel got so tight and one of their prizes was a trip to California, and... well, they were a little worried about it. About how people would feel about it in case it came out.”

“So they asked you not to say anything about it?” Sylvia asked sympathetically.

“Well, not to talk about it. And he just said to get my things packed and — they said there wasn’t anything to conceal, but I just didn’t need to go around telling everybody right where I was going.”

“I see,” Selby said, “and they gave you a ticket?”

“That’s right, first-class ticket, Pullman ticket, and gave me money to eat on on the dining car. Even figured out everything including a tip to the porter. But, land sakes, they must have thought I was a millionaire the way they wanted me to go around tipping porters. I didn’t give that porter as much as they thought I should, I guess, but the railroad company is paying him a salary for doing his work, and that’s all he did, just his work.”

“Now the name of this company?” Selby asked.

“Land sakes, I don’t even know. It was some kind of a breakfast food company that wanted to advertise a new type of breakfast food. Something I’ve never heard of before and I don’t see what good they expected to get out of sending me to California. Of course, they said that where they have thousands of people taking part in a contest, they get a certain amount of advertising out of it, but me, I swear I didn’t even remember the name of the food they were advertising.”

“And the representative of the company — did he accompany you?”

“Oh no. He told me that I was to be turned over to some touring agency. Seems like that’s the way those big companies do. They can’t afford to handle the tours themselves, but there are touring agencies that make a specialty of those things, so the advertising agencies just turn their people over to the touring agencies.”

“And when you got to Madison City you were to wear a white gardenia so as to identify yourself?”

“That’s right.”

“And the man from the touring agency would also wear a white gardenia, I suppose.”

“That’s what they said.”

“And when you got to Madison City this man from the touring agency picked you up and took you in charge?”

“That’s right.”

“And brought you over here?”

“That’s it. This is where we stay the first night. Now, I don’t know just how long we’re going to stay here. The man from the touring agency seemed a little bit indefinite about it, but after all, it isn’t costing me a cent, and I’m getting a regular tour out of it. I have a niece in Sacramento and I asked the man if we were going up there. He said he didn’t know for sure, it depended on the way things were now. Travel conditions are terribly upset, you know, but he’s been very nice to me.”

“He left you here?”

“Got me a room here, yes.”

Selby frowned. “He couldn’t have driven you over here right after you left the train, Mrs. Irwin. There wasn’t time enough for him to have done that and...”

“Oh, that man that met me at the train wasn’t the one. That was a mistake.”

Selby saw Sylvia Martin’s face lose some of its animation as the full import of Mrs. Irwin’s remark hit her. “You say he wasn’t the one?” Selby asked. “Heavens sakes, no. That was just a mistake. The way it turned out, he was looking for somebody else, but he saw me with my white gardenia and he came over and talked to me, and said I was to go with him. And then he saw this other man that had won the second prize in the contest, and so he picked us both up to take us uptown. He seemed to be very nice.”

“And then what happened?” Selby asked.

She said, “It turned out that there’d been a mixup. The man that was to have met us was delayed a little bit. He found us sitting there in the automobile. The man that picked us up had gone to the bus depot and...”

Selby interrupted, his voice quickened with interest. “As I gather it, it turned out that this man who picked you up at the station was looking for someone else? Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“How long was he in the bus depot?”

“Oh, quite a little while I guess. I don’t know. We’d been sitting there in the car about ten minutes before this man that was to have met us showed up then and he was very apologetic.”

“Was he wearing a white gardenia?”

“No he wasn’t. He knew us all right though, because he had found out we’d left the depot in this man’s automobile. He drove up alongside and he was very sorry about everything, and he said we were to get in with him; that he was from the touring company and that he’d been a little bit late.”

“So you transferred from one automobile to the other?”

“That’s right.”

“Both of you?”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

“And then we came right over here and he put us in the hotel.”

“The man that won the second prize?” Selby asked. “Do you know who he was?”

“Yes, his name was — now wait a minute. It’s a funny name. Something like Castle. I always think of Castle when I think of it — Hastle — that’s it, H-a-s-t-l-e, Carl Hastle.”

“And what became of him? He didn’t stay at this hotel?”

“No, he’d won a different kind of trip from what I had. Not so good. He had a second prize. I’d won the first prize. I just can’t realize that out of all the people who sent in the answers that I...”

“And I take it,” Selby said, “that the man who represented the tours left you here, and then went on with this man Hastle?”

She looked at him blankly and shook her head.

“You don’t know where Hastle went?”

“No. The man from the touring agency took care of that.”

Selby flashed Sylvia Martin a warning glance. “Then the man from the touring agency is staying on here at the hotel?”

“That’s right.”

“Man about thirty-five with dark hair and gray eyes?” Selby asked casually.

“Yes. His name is Mr. Floris. He seems to be a very nice man.”

“You don’t know what room he’s in?”

“Well, now I just don’t. I know he took me here to the hotel and told me I was to register, and then he went to get some gasoline for his automobile, and when he got back I’d already been taken up to this room. He had some other matters to attend to. I didn’t see him only once or twice during the day. He says that on a tour of this sort you have to get things kind of organized and he has to find out from his home company...”

“Just a minute,” Selby said. “You wait right there. You want to stay here with her, Sylvia?”

“I do not,” Sylvia Martin said. “I want to go with you. You wait right here, Mrs. Irwin, we’ll be back. There’s one very important thing we have to find out about.”

Selby and Sylvia Martin left the perplexed woman rather abruptly. They dashed for the elevator, went down to the lobby.

The clerk looked up from a magazine.

“Say,” Selby said, as though an idea had just occurred to him, “that man from Denver that registered wasn’t Floris, was he?”

“That’s right, Elmer D. Floris.”

“Well, can you beat that?” Selby exclaimed. “What room’s he in?”

“Three-o-four.”

“Don’t ring him,” Selby said. “Isn’t this a coincidence? It shows what a small world it is after all.”

Back in the elevator it seemed that the slow-moving cage never would get to the third floor.

“Right in the adjoining room,” Sylvia Martin whispered. “Doug, do you suppose he could hear us?”

“You can’t tell,” Selby said. “He must have heard the telephone ring. Hang it, if he’s slipped through our fingers...”

“But that means Carr was telling the truth, doesn’t it?” Sylvia Martin asked.

Selby grinned. “It means that if he has to he can verify every fact he told us. This man Floris is the one who will break the chain leading to Carr...”

“Doug, if that’s the case, why didn’t Carr have Floris...?”

The elevator lurched to a stop with interminable slowness, the automatic mechanism released the door and slid it back in a series of jerks.

Selby and Sylvia almost ran down the corridor. “Stand to one side of the center of the door,” Selby said. “We don’t know just what we’re getting into.” He knocked on the door of 304. There was no answer. Selby knocked again.

There was no sound of motion from the inside of the room. Selby tried the knob of the door.

The knob turned freely. The door was unlocked. It swung open and after a moment Selby moved his arm around the door jamb to grope for the light switch on the wall. He found it and switched on the light.

The room was empty, but there was the smell of fresh cigar smoke and an open magazine lay face down on the table.

Selby entered the room. His hand pressed down on the cushion of the chair beside the table.

“Still warm,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Sylvia asked. “Do you think he...”

“Our bird has flown,” Selby said. “He could either hear our conversation in the adjoining room through the wall, or he had some sort of a listening device that he put up against the wall of the closet.”

Selby moved over to the telephone, snatched up the receiver, waited for several seconds before the night clerk’s leisurely hello came over the wire.

Selby’s voice was sharp with authority. “If this man who registered under the name of Elmer Floris comes down to the desk,” he said, “detain him until I get there. I’m coming right down.”

He didn’t give the surprised clerk any opportunity to reply, but slammed up the receiver and once more made a dash for the elevator. This time they found the elevator was back down at the ground floor and rather than wait for it, Selby found the stairs, went dashing down them two at a time, his pell-mell descent sounding like a rushing avalanche on the wooden staircase.

The face of the clerk showed bewilderment and suspicion. “Say,” he demanded, “what’s this all about? I thought you said you knew the man.”

“Has he checked out?”

“He must have been waiting to take the elevator down the minute you got up there.”

“And you let him pay his bill and...”

“The bill was all paid. He paid in advance. What’s the idea, anyway?”

Selby grabbed the desk telephone. “Connect us with long distance,” he said, “and get me the sheriff at Madison City just as fast you can put the call through. Tell them it’s a major emergency and we want action.”

It was less than a minute before Selby heard Rex Brandon’s drawling voice over the telephone.

“Rex,” Selby said, “we’re at Flora Vista at the Palace Hotel. A man you want has just checked out of here. He’s around thirty-five years old, dark hair, slate-gray eyes, dressed in... just a minute. Hold the line.”

Selby turned from the mouthpiece to the clerk. “How was he dressed?”

“Sort of a pin-stripe, blue business suit.”

“Overcoat?”

“Had one over his arm.”

“A bag?”

“That’s right, light traveling bag.”

Selby relayed the description over the telephone. “He’ll probably be traveling by private automobile. Put out a dragnet, Rex. We’ll tell you more when we get back to Madison City. Start the police working on it and get the highway patrol on the job. The man’s going under the name of Elmer D. Floris, but that’s probably an alias.”

Brandon’s voice was crisp with authority. “Okay, Doug, I’ll get busy on the wire right away. When will you tell me what it’s all about?”

“As soon as we can get back there,” Selby said. “We’ll have a passenger with us. Better wait at the office.”

Selby hung up the telephone, said to the clerk, “We’re going back up to Mrs. Irwin’s room. If she tries to check out — you’d better go up, Sylvia, I’ll wait here in the lobby.”

“What do I tell her?” Sylvia Martin asked.

“She’s going back to Madison City with us,” Selby said, “and don’t tell her too much. As far as she’s concerned, it’s just a part of her tour.”