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  Ruth Moore answered tautly. “Yes?”

  “Gil Vine, Miss Moore.”

  “Haveyouheardanything?” She hurried the words together.

  “I was just about to ask you that.”

  “He hasn’t phoned.” Her voice quavered with strain. “But—she called in. About ten minutes ago.”

  “Miss Millett?”

  “Yes. She asked for—Dow. She was all on edge when I told her we hadn’t heard from him. Crying, carrying on—”

  “Where was she?”

  “I asked her, but all she’d say was, ‘Mister Lanerd’ll know where to find me. Ask him to call me the minute he comes in, please.’” The secretary was close to the crack-up point herself.

  That was that. She hadn’t thought about stalling while she had the call traced. Hadn’t said anything about the murder, naturally. Hadn’t even told Hacklin & Co., about the call.

  I suggested she do that, gave the usual fatuous advice about taking it easy, told her I’d let her know soon’s I learned anything. After hanging up I had a feeling there were times when the telephone could be an instrument of torture.

  Waiting—everybody waiting to hear from Mr. Giveaway. Hacklin, Ruth Moore, Marge Lanerd, not to exclude G. Vine.

  “Might relieve your mind to know Tildy Millett isn’t planing to points east, Mrs. Lanerd. She just talked to Miss Moore. It wasn’t long-distance or our operator would have mentioned that before completing the call.”

  “She’s with him?” MacGregory asked.

  “No. I suppose she has a lot of friends who might put her up.”

  “Not many, here.” Marge Lanerd trilled the high keys plaintively. “She’s from Minnesota, originally, but she bought a big place down in the Kentucky Bluegrass, when she isn’t in a show or on the road she spends practically all her time there. Her agent, Mister Walch, might put her up at his place.”

  The producer vetoed that. “First place, Keith lives at the Gotham Athletic, which isn’t coeducational. Second place, she wouldn’t go to him for help; they’re always squabbling about publicity or contracts. He stays away from the studio about half the time because that Syrian maid of hers squawks about his making her nervous before a performance.”

  “The maid,” I said. “This Nikky what’s-her-name.”

  “Narian,” MacGregory answered.

  “Where’s she from?”

  “New Orleans, I think.” He shrugged. “She’s Tabasco, with a touch of T.N.T. Battles with me because I don’t have a private dressing-room for ‘her baby’—goes at the boss all fire and combustion because he let the D.A. bottle her up in that hotel suite—”

  “You can include me in that list, dear.” Marge smiled unhappily. “Nikky was ready to claw my eyes out this afternoon. She’d have done it, if Tildy hadn’t scolded her in Syrian—”

  “Arabic,” MacGregory said.

  “Yair.” I gave the phone back to His Haughtiness. “Well. We know she’s still in town. So Mister Lanerd couldn’t have gone out of town with her. Expect you’ll be hearing from him any minute.” I was lying by the clock. But it didn’t seem right to inflict my suspicions on Mrs. Lanerd. She had enough of her own to contend with.

  It was just eleven by the neon-circled clock on Dave’s Place when I crunched the gravel of the parking oval under my tires. Just three hours since Ada’d showed me a spot of oil on a pillow slip.

  The last of the fight fans would be surging out of the Garden. The first of the theater crowd would be straggling into the Calypso Room. I was tired and puzzled and uneasy as a cat on a hot stove; Lanerd’s disappearance bothered me. Everything I knew about him indicated he’d be the sort to keep in touch at a time when the storm signals were flying.

  The burgery wasn’t chock-full of chic; what it was full of was cabbage and beef-stew odors. But there were a couple of motorcycles out in the oval; they had state licenses. Those road cops seldom patronize places where the grub isn’t first chop.

  “T-bone and French frys,” I told the shorty behind the counter.

  “Smothered?”

  “Uh, uh.” That’s a cross all hotel men have to bear. No onions. Ever.

  I consoled myself with a jug of brew, took it into a phone booth that smelled like a smoking car on the Erie.

  When I got through to Tim, I forgot about the smell. “That hophead,” he boomed excitedly. “That Al Gowriss and so forth!”

  “Remember your blood pressure. What about him?”

  “Maxie—on car four—he made this hophead right away, soon’s Morry showed him the flyer. Maxie was off duty, but Morry got hold of him, called him back to check.”

  “Gowriss in the house?”

  “He was. This aft. Around six. Max don’t recall which floor Gowriss got off at. But he thinks prob’ly it was twenty. An’ Gil!”

  “You’re busting my eardrum.”

  “Max never did take this gorilla down again. None of the other elevator operators seem to have, either. He must still be upstairs!”

  Chapter Eighteen: GIRL IN HIDING

  I HOPED IT WAS TRUE. If it was, Auguste was in the clear on the killing, and since presumably Hacklin had half a dozen of the DAides in the hotel by then, they ought to nab Gowriss. But there was a small doubt in my mind. Maxie.

  Max liked to tell the tale, to make it dramatic. If he took a Distinguished Personage in his car late at night and the gentleman had perhaps imbibed one over the eight, as Mickey would say, by morning Maxie would be relating how the rubber-legged guest had fallen flat on his face as he stepped out of the elevator. A pretty who smiled casually at Max would, an hour later, have been inviting him up to help unhook her girdle.

  So I warned Tim not to call in the Marines until Gowriss’s presence in the hotel had been verified by someone less inclined to Play It Up Big.

  “Okay, okay.” He was hurt that I hadn’t slammed down the receiver and come a-running. “Only other thing, this Schneider says Auguste admits bein’ in hock to some loan shark for two hundred an’ fifty seeds. This Schneider seems t’think that was the motive for robb’ry an’ the murder was committed because th’ guard discovered Auguste makin’ the grab.”

  “If they’re going to list everyone who owes dough as a suspect, they’ll have a nice, long job. Look in the personnel file there, Timothy. Find the phone number for that pastry chef we got out of trouble with the steward’s department, for stealing that hundred pounds of caraway seeds. Tadross, wasn’t it?”

  “Wait a sec.” I could see him going through the file as if he had mittens on. “Yeah. Khalil Tadross—no phone listed.”

  “What’s his address?”

  “Sixteen ’n a half Washington Street. I don’ know where that is—”

  “I do. Look, Tim. There’ll be a couple of pressers still down in the valet room. Ask ’em if they remember seeing a cream-colored jacket with chocolate checks, last couple of days, huh?”

  “Sounds like something Milton Berle’d wear. Say, I checked on Auguste’s scrap with the roast chef. Chef weighs fifty pounds more’n Auguste but he got backed into a hot oven just the same. Auguste is nobody to pick a muss with. When’ll you be back?”

  “Little while. See if you can get Max to give you more details on Al Gowriss; if he remembers too much you’ll know it’s the balonus.”

  The hullabaloo on the juke was something about a wild goose. I needed no reminder I might be chasing something I couldn’t catch.

  Gowriss might have had an accomplice check in the hotel. Later on he could have gone up to the accomplice’s room, from there sneaked up to 21MM. But then how had Tildy Millett escaped assassination? And how had he managed to get in the suite? Had he been in her bedroom all the time they’d been eating in the living-room? Or had he gotten in after dinner, while the skater and Nikky were in the bedroom? Only way to find out was from Tildy. Or the Syrian maid.

  Our kitchen staff is a sort of miniature United Nations. French sauce chefs, Austrian bakers, Danish fish cooks, Italian vegetable chefs, Filipi
no silver boys. And one Syrian, a pastry chef. There weren’t so many Syrians in New York; probably they kept to themselves fairly closely. A Tadross might know where to find a Narian.

  A mile or so beyond Dave’s I stopped churning all that around, began to wonder about the taxi in my rearview.

  I’d been driving at thirty; the cab didn’t try to pass me, though its top lights were on, which meant it had no fare. At night cab jockeys seldom drive so slow when they’re out on the Parkway where there’s not much chance of picking up a customer.

  Cars passed him, passed me; he stayed about a hundred yards behind me. I speeded up to fifty, passing other cars; he hung right there on my tail.

  I swung off a Parkway exit, switched off my lights. He slowed, came right up to the exit, stopped for a second, then rolled on toward the city. If there was anyone riding in the rear seat I couldn’t see him; it was too dark and too far away for me to tell if the flag was down.

  Nerves, Gilbert, I chided myself. Be peeking under your bed before you turn in, next thing you know.

  Nerves or not, two people had been bedded down in the morgue already. I kept an eye out for a trailing taxi all the way to the East River Drive, but how was I to tell one cab from another? All I’d seen of the hackie was a low-pulled cap and an undershot jaw.

  I crossed to Fourth, went down Lafayette, over to Broadway, west a block on Rector. Washington Street looked like something out of a Currier & Ives print of pre-Civil War New York.

  Next to an imposing marble bank, a row of narrow stores; windows full of brassware and rugs and jewelry; squiggly black Arabic signs; the only English lettering names such as those on upper windows along Fifth Avenue below Thirty-Fourth. Bardwil, Maluf, Lian.

  A brightly lighted coffee shop. More curlicue signs. A row of brick houses with dark hallways and gloomy alleys leading on back to courtyards somewhere. Small, dark, bearded men wearing derby hats and pointed slippers. Thin-boned women with beautiful oval faces and enormous almond-shaped eyes, long hair down over their shoulders. And strange, pleasant, spicy smells.

  Sixteen and a half was between a coffee shop and a window full of musical instruments that looked like mandolins and guitars with the mumps.

  I had to go to Battery Park to find a place to park. I kept an eye out for taxis as I walked back. There weren’t any.

  The first youngsters I asked to direct me to Mr. Tadross just stared out of big black eyes, backed away from me, and ran. Finally I found an old man with a sweet, sorrowful face like that of a saint in those old Italian paintings; he directed me down a moldering hall, up a flight of stairs to a sort of rickety balcony opening onto a tiny court full of washing on clotheslines, trash barrels, and baby carriages.

  There weren’t any numbers on the doors. I called, “Tadross,” a couple of times; he came out of one of the doors. A fat man with eyes sunk deep in bulgy sacs, a bulbous chin, he was in his undershirt and a pair of those pointed, heelless slippers.

  He was glad to see me, until I told him what I wanted.

  “I don’t know any girl of that name, Mister Vine. Has she done something bad?” He gazed at me fearfully.

  “Not as far as I know. She can help get one of our room-service captains out of a mess, Tadross. Auguste. You know Auguste.”

  His face lighted up.

  “Oh, yes. He’s in trouble?”

  “They’ve arrested him for something he didn’t do. But this Narian girl may be able to fix it.”

  “One moment.” He disappeared into his room, came out directly in an embroidered silk jacket. “We will see.”

  We went along the balcony, down the stairs, back through the black tunnel of the hall. On the street he asked me to wait.

  “I will inquire among friends,” he said in his liquid half-French accent. “I think they may talk more freely if I am alone.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can promise nothing. But you have been a good friend. I myself might have been in trouble, save that you have a large heart.”

  “I know when a man is really honest, Tadross.”

  “Yes. So I will do what I can.”

  He went into the coffee shop next door. I smoked and inspected glass jars of strange vegetables in a store window—They looked like vegetables; they may have been cuttlefish for all I know.

  After a minute, Tadross came out, sluff-sluffed up Washington Street in his slippers. I lost sight of him.

  It was fifteen minutes before he came back. His face was solemn.

  “I can tell you,” he said slowly, “though I have made a falsehood by saying I would not do this.”

  “You have to do those things sometimes.”

  “She is not from here. The name is common but she is from the state of Louisiana. But she is a cousin of Golub Narian. He lives in the Syrian colony on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. You know?”

  “Sure.” I’d never known there was a Little Syria in Brooklyn.

  He gave me the address. “My friends were much disturbed when I asked about her.” Tadross fingered his chubby chin. “She is hiding from someone. She does not wish people to know where she is. And—” he searched my eyes thoughtfully, “you are the second tonight who has tried to find her. But the other—he learned nothing.”

  Chapter Nineteen: EXPLAINING A MURDER

  MY KNOWLEDGE OF SYRIA was limited to recognition of the round orange luggage stickers from the Hotel Magnifique in Damascus. Plus the fact that “on my whiskers’ life” is violent cussing in Lebanese. According to Tadross.

  Even if I’d been hep to those travelogue talkies, it wouldn’t have helped me to understand the Narians. The house to which I’d been directed, a block away from the Atlantic Avenue section of Little Syria, was an ordinary frame double-decker, outside. Inside—even the glimpse from the hall to which the solemneyed teen-ager in a loose, long-sleeved, ankle-length silk something admitted me—the place was right out of the Arabian Nights.

  A sunset of tapestries on the walls. Oriental rugs in rich wine and amber on the floor. More rugs over low divans. Stray scarfs of luscious silk, scattered around. Brass-and-black-marble coffee table with a circle of thimble-size gilt cups. A great glass-and-porcelain contraption with long tubing and a curved ivory pipestem on a copper stand. There were none of the nondescript steel engravings or wishy-washy color paintings such as decorate our soigné hotel apartments. The Narians didn’t miss them; in their place hung rifles with curved stocks and long blue barrels and mother-of-pearl inlay on the locks, scimitars with silver hilts and beautifully engraved blades, daggers with jeweled handles. As the radio commercials say, Mmmmm!

  Golub Narian fitted the picture perfectly. About forty. Sharp-featured, long-nosed, thick-lipped; a face hewn out of well-polished mahogany. White fez on top, brown beard at the bottom.

  He received me in the long living-room, listened politely with his head tilted, birdlike, while I told him I wanted to get in touch with the Miss Narian who accompanied Miss Tildy Millett. It seemed crass to say “worked for” in that home of splendor.

  He was extremely sorry; he didn’t know what I was talking about; perhaps his English was too poor to understand me correctly; how had I happened to visit his home?

  I said I’d just come from Mister Lanerd’s.

  He was courteous but unimpressed. Some badly informed person must have misdirected me.

  I’d been using my eyes while he gave out with his Levantine version of the runaround; the only genuinely New Yorky thing in that gorgeous room was a pile of newspapers on a copper-and-tile table beside one of the divans. A couple were in that curlicue type, but the one on top of the pile was our most lurid tabloid. Dated Wednesday, the eleventh. With a full-page picture of Johnny the Grocer as he lay in a puddle of blood on the floor of a phone booth. Story on page three!

  Either Nikky had been there recently, or the Narians had learned of their cousin’s interest in Johnny Scaluck and his killer. I picked up the paper.

  “There’s likely to be more of this sort of thi
ng, Mister Narian. I may be able to save your cousin and Miss Millett a great deal of trouble if I can talk to Miss Narian.”

  He wouldn’t admit anything. He surveyed me with an impassivity that would have earned him many a pot at our Dealer’s Choice Association meetings. He apologized for leaving me while he consulted with others who were doubtless as ignorant as he was, about the matters of which I spoke.

  He was gone so long Nikky would have had time to get halfway to the Canadian border. I’d practically given up when zip! Suddenly a girl was in the room. She’d slipped in behind me so silently she could have plunged one of those scimitar blades in my back, before I knew there was anyone around. She was an older edition of the slender child who’d let me in the house, and wore the same kind of floor-sweeping silk wrapper. Long silver earrings dangled on either side of her olive face.

  But the younger one was merely attractive. This girl was voluptuous. Prominent breasts, wide hips, sultry mouth. Even her almond-shaped eyes could have been an invitation, except they were resentful and hostile.

  “Hello. You’re Nikky?”

  “Who are you?” She wouldn’t admit anything, either.

  “Gilbert Vine. I work for the Plaza Royale.” I didn’t want to frighten her by saying “detective.”

  “What you want?”

  “To get a message to Miss Millett.”

  “How do I know where she is?” Nikky shrugged.

  “There’s been an arrest in connection with the murder in Miss Millett’s hotel suite.”

  She didn’t bat an eye.

  “Miss Millett might save an innocent man by telling what she knows about the killing.”

  “I am sorry. I cannot—”

  She swung around as someone moaned, “Ahhh!” from the doorway.

  Tildy rushed into the room. No fake eye patch or Spanish combs. The black wig was gone; the familiar platinum Dutch bob was back. Crisp white shirtwaist, pale lemon skirt. She was the Queen of Skates as I remembered her. Strictly a knockout.

  After rubbing elbows with celebrities for a few years, you get to have a certain contempt for most of them, simply because it’s difficult to understand how they happen to be famous. But there are always a few who command your respect if not admiration. Hard to put your finger on that quality. Whatever it was, she had a lot of it. She would always be the center of attention, no matter how many others were around. She seized my arm frantically.