Dead of Night Read online

  “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.

  Chapter Three: MISSING STEAK KNIFE

  MY GANG at those Friday night Dealer’s Choice Association gatherings will testify I’m far from psychic. But any dummy in a Fifth Avenue window could have sensed something nokay in that suite.

  The blood—and the gun—were plain implications. And no security chief can afford violence in his hotel, however much he may admire it from the ringside at Madison Square. Naturally the front office doesn’t expect me to be wise to all the details every time something illegal or immoral goes on behind one of our twelve hundred locked doors. But the management does have a quaint method of insuring against too frequent trouble; unless the head man of the protection staff is sharp enough to catch the warning of those offbeat incidents which break into the regular rhythm of routine, he hunts for another job, but sudden. Hotels, like cars, ought to run smooth and quiet.

  The indications of trouble in Suite 21MM were as plain as red blinkers at a grade crossing. Still, could be the troubles weren’t any of my business. I had to bear that in mind; the management being so skittish about being sued by annoyed guests.

  Natural reluctance to run into people while wearing an eye patch might have kept a good-looking gal more or less hidden in her rooms for five days. She could have private reasons for two-ing around with a hard-eyed customer in a misfit dinner jacket. There could even be plausible justification for a guy sleeping in a gal’s hotel suite when they weren’t registered as man and wife.

  But the blood on my hand was a tough one to explain. I had to find out about that. Even at the risk of offending the big billboard-and-broadcast man.

  The gun was the only item I was sure I’d touched since coming in the suite. But if there’d been blood on my hands when I wrangled the automatic away from him, some would have smeared that nice white linen suit. It hadn’t. His sleeve was spotless.

  Watching him fiddling with the dials, some of the stuff I’d read in that magazine came back to me:… a playboy who does his most dynamic work while having fun… who goes at sport as aggressively as if it was a top-drawer business deal… shoots golf in the middle seventies… flew his own six-place jet job to Alaska for black bear… sailed his ketch to Easter Island recently for monster marlin…

  There’d been pages of such guff; he was a crack squash-rackets man, one of the country’s best off the high diving-board, what it added up to—no panty-waist, he. If the kingpin of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright had been jittery enough to carry side arms, there was more in the wind than cheap cigar smoke.

  “No use handing you a lot of horse, Vine.” Now he was giving with the man-to-man approach. No more winning grin. Just a good, honest scowl. “I don’t like this business one damn bit.”

  “Makes us even.” I wasn’t certain we were talking about the same thing.

  “Suppose not. Well, you may know I have something to do with certain television programs.” He kept his face toward me but his eyes were cocked up at a corner of the ceiling, the way people do when they’re trying to hear a sound behind them.

  “Practically subsidize the networks, don’t you?” The bleached-wood top of the coffee table was clean as a hound’s molars. The blood hadn’t come from that.

  “Putting it a bit strong.” His smile registered appreciation. “Our clients have several of the high-rated programs. This Stack O’ Jack simulcast which’ll come on here in a second is rather outstanding among audience-participation shows, one of the most popular our agency has developed.” He talked at me but turned his head to one side. His ears would have to be better than mine, to hear anything out in the corridor, over the whoopdeedo booming from the loud-speaker—a blare of trumpets and an announcer who sounded as excited as if he was describing a knockdown in a heavyweight championship:

  “Hear-Ye… See-Ye… Whee-Ye!… It’s Stack… O’ Jack… time!”

  On the screen, a banner waved sequin-spangled letters:

  E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y P-L-A-Y-S

  THE KOBLER GLOVE CORPORATION PAYS A STACK O’JACK

  Biggest Prizes on the Air

  You Can Play It Anywhere

  The banner lifted to reveal thick packets of bills, tall piles of silver ducats, a water cooler packed to the spigot with half dollars, a plastic sack big enough to hold a bushel of wheat but crammed full of quarters. All coyly labeled to goose the imagination: $10,000, $7500, $5000, $2500.

  It occurred to me I might have grabbed hold of the set during our disarming act. “Never happened to catch your show, Mister Lanerd. Conflicts with the fights.”

  He gave out with a prop ha-ha. “You’d get more attractive odds on Stack O’ Jack than at the Garden.” He wondered why I was examining the set, but didn’t ask.

  There wasn’t any blood on the cabinet or the carpet around it. “I’ve heard about it. You put on some guess artist, keep him hidden from the audience, but let ’em hear his voice or see the back of his haircut, then pay off if the party you call long distance can identify. That the setup?”

  “Guess artist? Very good. Yes.” He did hear something out in the hall then; his hand slid down into the pocket where he had the gun. “Yes. Not quite as simple as that, perhaps. If you watch here for a minute—”

  I only half paid attention to the luscious creech who appeared on the screen in close-up, pulling on a pair of gloves, caressing the fingers the way dames do. She had a sensational pair of shoulders; that was about all I noticed because she sat with her back to the cameras, in front of a dressing-table with one of those trick mirrors, counting the reflections; forty snugly gloved fingers frolicked around while some syrupy announcer drooled:

  “To you who already appreciate the incomparable luxury of Smoothskin Handwear—to you who plan to
compliment your sense of well-being when next you need fine gloves—the Kobler Glove Corporation offers truly the chance of a lifetime—the opportunity to win twenty-five thousand dollars in cash: Twenty… Five… Thousand… Dollars!”

  Generally, when people come up with those impressive figures, I listen. Often as not here in the Plaza Royale they actually have that kind of corn and aren’t just blowing Broadway bubbles. But I couldn’t keep my mind on what the spieler was selling; I’d just remembered what it was I’d touched. The door. The door or the jamb leading from the living-room into Miss Marino’s bedroom and bath.

  I went to it while violins began to moan about those Pa-a-ale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar.

  The hand that had touched the inside of that door hadn’t been so pale.

  No doubt about its being a hand; marks of the fingers were still there, sticky-thick crimson blotches on the inside of the French-gray door. Four fingers of a right hand, the marks weren’t large enough for me to be sure whether they’d been made by a man or woman.

  There were only those four prints, about a foot above the lock. And on the edge of the door, where it fits the jamb, the thumb had left another smear. That had been before the door had been closed; there was a corresponding streak on the metal jamb. The mark I’d gotten on my hand had come from that edge of the door, where I’d pushed it open a little.

  When I turned around Lanerd was watching the screen, but standing so he could have seen me peer around the door, at the jamb.

  “This is what I want you to see, Vine.” He beckoned, as some ill-mannered guests do to a bellman.

  I didn’t move. I could see all I wanted from where I stood.

  On the tube, another cutie was playing a piano, the camera shooting down on the keyboard from above so only her hands and forearms showed. Not even the shoulders, this time.

  I don’t know enough about ivory technique to tell whether she was good or not, but her playing was brisk and full of spirit.

  The tune was We Won’t Go Home Until Morning; but the words some baritone was enunciating carefully weren’t the ones I knew:

  “These are the hands of a charmer

  Millions of people have seen

  In magazines, newspapers, movies,

  And now—on our Stack O’ Jack screen—”

  The camera pushed right down close on the hands. The hands and keyboard vanished. A huge question mark took the center of the bulb.

  “You understand now, Vine?” Lanerd gave me the chummy, confidential tone, the buddy-to-buddy lift of the bushy gray eyebrows.

  “No.” I took a step away from the bedroom door, but stopped, hearing the soft snick of a key in a door lock close by.

  “The Stack O’ Jack secret.” Apparently he hadn’t heard the key. “The answer to the twenty-five-thousand-dollar question.”

  “Oh.” The door from the corridor to the bedroom began to swing. I stepped into the living-room where I couldn’t be seen, but could peek at reflections in the bureau mirror.

  “Miss Marino.” He was beginning to be irritated. “She’s Miss Hands! We’ve been working our tails off to keep her under cover. All sorts of crackpots try to find out who she is—where she lives—so now you see—”

  What I saw was a black jacket, a starched shirt, a thin, pale face—in the mirror. I stepped back into the bedroom.

  The weak, watery, china-blue eyes of Auguste, our senior room-service captain, opened very wide. Auguste was around fifty; he must have been carrying a napkin over his arm most of his half century; he had all the professional deformities—stoop shoulders, flat feet, an expression of weary disillusionment.

  “Mister Fine! Ah, hello—Mister Fine.”

  “What you after, Auguste?”

  He wiped the back of his left hand with the long, thin bony fingers of his right. “Nozzing of importance, Mister Fine.”

  “No?” I went up to him. He still held the pass key between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand; it wiggled while he massaged the knuckles of the other hand. “You usually bust in a suite like this without knocking?”

  “I had been told; Miss Marino told me, there would be no one here at this time. So I do not bozzer to knock.”

  Lanerd moved in behind me.

  “Hi, Auguste. What’s ’a matter?”

  “Is only one of the pieces does not come back with the serving-table, Mister Lanerd. So we make check-off. I find it is mizzing. I come back for it, is all.”

  “What piece?” I asked.

  “A knife, Mister Fine. One of our bone-handled sszteak knifes. Perhaps you haf seen it?”

  “No,” I told him. “But I’ll have a look around for it.”

  “Pardon, Mister Fine. Is not my intention to bozzer you.”

  “That’s all right, Auguste. If I find it, I’ll let you know.”

  He said, “Thank you ferry much,” and, “Good efening, Mister Lanerd,” and bowed himself out. I thought he looked more unhappy than usual. If that was possible.

  Dow Lanerd slapped my shoulder. “Well, now you’ve been taken behind the scenes, Vine—”

  “Haven’t been,” I said. “But I’m going to have a look there, right now.”

  Chapter Four: SITTING CORPSE

  OUR CHARIOT TRADE entertains the notion that an assistant manager is merely a convenient mustache stationed in the lobby so upon request he can direct the high-heeled half of our clientele to “the first door on the left upstairs on the mezzanine.” Truth is, some bow ties aren’t good for much else. Reidy Duman is.

  Reidy doesn’t make with a headwaiter’s hot buttered hauteur. But he chums with our upper-crust patrons as easily as he gets along with the staff. High score in any hostelry.

  So I was glad to see his long-nosed, cleft-chinned countenance poking in from the other bedroom, a minute after Auguste left.

  For one thing, the Plaza Royale has a rock-ribbed rule: never unlock a closet in absence of guest—unless an assistant manager is nigh. For another, I couldn’t search the suite and keep an eye on Lanerd, at the same time.

  It wouldn’t be fair to suggest he was acting like a man who’d used a steak knife with felonious intent; I’d had no experience along those lines. But he wasn’t acting with the aplomb you’d expect of a business wizard with an international rep. I didn’t turn my back on him, tell you that.

  “You dine here in the suite, Mister Lanerd?”

  “No.” He didn’t seem to be paying attention to the Stack O’ Jack yammer-yammer any longer; wasn’t even watching the screen. “I have to speak at that banquet downstairs, hour or so. Miss Marino had dinner here with her maid, far’s I know.”

  The whoop-it-up lad on the program soothed some party at the other end of the phone, for having guessed Miss Mystery was Dinah Shore and anyhow she was still a great big winner because wasn’t she getting a fine pair of Koblers for free? “How long you been here, Mister Lanerd?”

  “About fifteen minutes.” Lanerd backed against the wall as Reidy came in from the other bedroom. If he wasn’t rigid with apprehension, he gave a good imitation of it.

  “Evening.” Reidy sensed electricity in the air. He was bland as butter. “Everything all right?” He might have been addressing the wonder-boy.

  I answered, “Trying to find out, Reidy. Guest’s out of her suite. Mister Lanerd’s here at her invitation but doesn’t know when she’ll return.” I didn’t mention that he couldn’t have been in the suite with her more than a couple of minutes, if his statement about arriving fifteen minutes ago was on the up and up. It had been just that long since I saw her in the lobby.

  “Wait, wait now, Vine.” Lanerd made that ducal gesture of the vertical palm. “Since it’s been necessary to let you in on our secret, no reason you shouldn’t know Miss Marino’s expected back right after the show.” He checked with his wrist watch. “Say, twenty-five minutes.”

  He acted as if that explained everything. It didn’t clarify the reason for his standing guard over an empty room, while this Mystery
Mamma was at the studio. But Reidy nodded sagely, as if he understood everything, including my going to work with master keys on the two big closets opening off the living-room.

  I gave him the gist while I opened doors, switched lights on and off, peered in at empty coat hangers, rawhide luggage marked with T.M.

  “Miss Marino’s the gimmick-girl on Mister Lanerd’s Stack O’ Jack video showdeo. They’ve been keeping her under cover; anybody who spotted her as the Mystery Miss would be in line for twenty-five thousand, if he happened to be on the right phone at the same time.”

  “The name doesn’t mean much to me.” Reidy shrugged. “But I can understand now why we haven’t seen much of her.”

  “Yair, sure.” I wasn’t sure. Those tower suites are all air-conditioned, but I was sweating like a fry cook at the fat kettle. I’d keyed my way into one guest’s rooms, strong-armed another important patron, and trumpeted a hurry call for an assistant manager. For what?

  A gun. A splotch of blood. A missing steak knife. But so far, nothing else. Empty closets in the old corral. If that was all, one and all would be extremely vexed. With reason.

  Lanerd trailed me into Miss Marino’s bedroom, stood a yard away from the blood-prints on the door without noticing them, apparently, while I gave the quick peek under the twin beds. Blanko.

  “Marks on the carpet.” I wanted to wise Reidy to the fact there was more reason for my snooping than met the casual glance.

  Reidy knew what the marks meant, took the ball away from me for a minute. “Why should Miss Marino want to block her door? Strictly against fire regulations, you know.” He might have been speaking to me.

  Lanerd started to explain. “My agency has naturally insisted on her taking all possible precautions for remaining incognito—” He didn’t finish.

  I’d switched on the bulb in the closet nearest the corridor in Miss Marino’s bedroom; Lanerd and Reidy could see the legs the second the light went on. Man’s legs amid a mass of femme footwear. Big legs in black dress pants, big feet stretched out so polished toes glinted in the glare.