The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  Captain Crawford was examining his notes. Actually, I thought, he was quietly absorbing the heightened vibrations set up by just the mention of Molly McShane’s name. He must have been completely insentient, as well as deaf, dumb, and blind, not to be aware of them, or the startled surprise on Bill’s face, or the quick glance he and Sheep exchanged. And Viola Kersey was even more startled. I think she was realizing fully that instead of jumping the pond she’d landed plop in the middle of it, and under circumstances that made it impolitic, to say the least, for her to call for help. The maid and the night watchman were completely impassive—too familiar, I supposed, with the general whoopdedoo of their less stable customers to be surprised at anything.

  “Where is this Miss McShane?” Captain Crawford inquired, of no one in particular.

  “She’s gone to bed,” the maid said abruptly. “She has a seven-thirty call. Do you want me to get her? She needs her sleep.”

  “In the morning will do,” Captain Crawford said. “It’ll do for all of you, if you’ll be here around ten-thirty. By that time we ought to be able to find out who this girl was and who she was seeing here at the hotel.”

  It seemed to me an abrupt and surprising dismissal. Mrs. Kersey had not been questioned at all, as far as I knew. She had the appearance of someone with a story all made up to tell and no one to tell it to. But perhaps it was just intended to be told to the maid, Rose, who’d started off immediately.

  “Maid,” she said. “You didn’t leave me enough hand towels. Will you bring some, and bring me a pitcher of ice cubes. I’d like some left in my room every night.”

  She turned to me. “Are you coming, Mrs. Latham?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mrs. Latham a minute,” Captain Crawford said. “The rest of you can go along.” He looked at Bill and Sheep, waiting by the door. “You two go home. Be sure and be here in the morning. And you too, Dad.”

  “Okay, okay.” Mr. Shavin went out with Bill and Sheep. They walked down to the entrance gate, leaving the bellboy, Nat, to escort Mrs. Kersey to her room.

  “That your son, Mrs. Latham?” Captain Crawford inquired pleasantly, nodding after them.

  I said yes.

  “And the other one? He a friend of your son’s?”

  I said yes again. “They were in the war together. Navy fliers.”

  “And they’re waiters here now?”

  “They’re in school,” I said. “They’re waiters on the side.”

  “I like to see boys with some git up and git to them,” he said. “Now this McShane girl. She a friend of theirs?”

  I nodded.

  “From all I hear, I guess they think quite a lot of her?”

  It seemed to me it was a form of dialectic leading to only one point. He could have skipped it all and got there quicker.

  “They’d do about anything for her, I guess, wouldn’t they?”

  “They wouldn’t tie a string or a vine over a step for somebody to trip on for her, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

  Captain Crawford smiled benignly.

  “That string business is interesting, isn’t it, Mrs. Latham? We can’t tell tonight, but it looks as if whoever tied a string, or a vine, there—if they did—must have had somebody in mind. They’d be going down the steps. That lets out old Shavin—he’d be coming up. Looks like this Mrs. Kersey would be the one most likely to be going down them, doesn’t it? That is, if they knew she was out of her room. Now if they didn’t, it might be somebody they figured was going down to visit her. Or it could just be somebody she figured would be going down there while she was away.”

  I was a little startled at that, for an instant.

  “But that isn’t likely,” I said. “The maid went down after Mrs. Kersey came up. If Mrs. Kersey did it, it would mean she had to go out of the room she was visiting, tie the string there, and come back. It seems highly involved to me.”

  “I didn’t say it was the case,” Captain Crawford said blandly. “You just have to consider all angles. What was in Miss McShane’s bag, Mrs. Latham?”

  The surprise technique was altogether too simple just then. I shook my head.

  “What do you know about Mrs. Kersey?”

  “Nothing at all. I never saw her before this evening at dinner.”

  “Now, that’s interesting. I would have taken my oath on it when you two were sitting here tonight that you knew her better than that and you didn’t much like her. That’s just the idea I got when you came in the room. And I thought your son and Clarke didn’t like her any better than you did. It’s funny how you get ideas, isn’t it?”

  I agreed that it was.

  “I’ll just walk back your way with you, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “I think maybe it would be a good idea for nobody to get too curious, or try any amateur detective stuff like you see in the movies—like those two boys, for instance, when they get to wishing they’d kept still about the bag. You never know what you might run into—it’s so blessed dark around here at night.”

  We came to the steps. “You couldn’t see a vine if it was tied to the other post under that step, could you, very well, now?” he asked, glancing down at it. “You sure couldn’t. So, good night, Mrs. Latham. Don’t worry about that boy of yours. I’ll see they go home, in case they had any ideas of hanging around. I suppose Viola Van Zant was before your time to go to the movies, wasn’t she?”

  “No, I remember her very well,” I said. “We asked the waiter who she was tonight. I couldn’t remember then, but she looked familiar.”

  “She made quite a name for herself in her day,” he said. “A lot of people still around here didn’t like her much, in those days. Jealousy, maybe. It’s a funny business. I guess there’s more jealousy concentrated in these ten square miles you’re in now than any place there is. Well, I guess that’s life, as they say.”

  He was looking down at Mrs. Kersey’s cottage. Every light was on, outside as well as in. It was a pool of brilliance in the surrounding darkness, but the silence of it gave it the false static quality a house has when it’s been full of people who’ve all gone home and it seems to be waiting for someone to go around and let it relax into privacy again.

  “I guess she’s more comfortable that way,” Captain Crawford said. “I guess that’s the main difference between people and animals. Animals feel safer in the dark. Or maybe she’s just waiting for her hand towels and that pitcher of ice. My wife used to spend an hour every night putting ice on her face to keep it from sagging, but she gave up finally. I guess it was too much trouble. It sure made her a lot easier to live with. Well, good night, Mrs. Latham.”

  He looked around. Rose was plugging along the flagstone path toward us with towels and a pitcher. The ice cubes clinked angrily at every step, and as she came up we could see a dour gleam in her eye.

  “Take it easy,” Captain Crawford said. “Don’t get riled up. You wouldn’t expect the lady to use the same towel twice, would you?”

  The maid looked at him impassively. “You can always tell them.” There was a tinge of bitterness in her voice. “People that are really used to things don’t go around making extra trouble for the help just to prove they are somebody.”

  We watched her go heavily down the steps and into 31-B.

  “Hope she didn’t throw it at her,” Captain Crawford remarked. “Well, good night, Mrs. Latham.”

  I went on into my own room. In a moment Captain Crawford’s footsteps grated on the tiled hall floor and I heard him knock on the door across from mine. I heard him say “Mr. Smith? Sorry to bother you.”

  He probably wasn’t half as sorry, I thought, as “Mr. Smith.” It must be hard at best to explain to the police why you’re in a hotel under an assumed name. A dead girl on the doorstep, a middle-aged lady in gray pajamas going home at one o’clock, must add a certain element of hazard even if you’re innocent as the whole company of angels. And that George Gannon, even if he had not appeared, was still awake, was evident from the speed with which Captain Cr
awford’s “Mr. Smith?” had followed his knock on the door. It had taken Mrs. Kersey longer than that to get in.

  It’s no doubt wrong to enjoy anyone else’s discomfiture—and anyway, it wasn’t George Gannon’s that I found myself a little amused at as I went to bed. It was Lucille Gannon’s. If she could regard Bill and Sheep’s chaperonage of Molly McShane as moral dissolution, or, as Bill thought, her husband’s professional interest in Molly as an intimate and personal one, she wasn’t likely to take a kindly and optimistic view of the lady in gray pajamas visiting him at this time of night. The pleasure of hearing her try to explain it, was something I looked forward to, rather, and I turned off my light in a more relaxed frame of mind than I would have done if I’d been thinking about Bill and Sheep and Molly McShane. I had to get up at last, however, and close my bathroom door. The glow of the lights from Mrs. Kersey’s cottage came through the frosted window. There was no use waiting till she turned them off, because it was at length apparent she was going to leave them on all night. That more than anything else made it obvious that Mrs. Kersey was not very easy in her mind. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to have been waked by a strangled scream from the lower terrace. But I wasn’t— I was waked by a telephone bell vibrating through the wall.

  It was in Mrs. Ansell’s room next to mine. The abruptness of the early morning call set her coughing again. I looked at my clock. It was eight, and the sun was streaming in the patio windows. Mrs. Ansell was talking, to New York, I gathered. Her voice was almost as plain as if she were in the room with me.

  “I know, dear. Of course it’s my fault. But no matter how cordial, a producer and director are, I can’t write a story about their star if their star won’t see me, can I? I mean, I can’t afford just to sit around indefinitely— not when I have to pay four dollars and forty-three cents for a pitcher of orange juice when there’s a whole tree full of them outside my front door. Yes, I know, dear. It comes off my income tax. I could pay my income tax and buy a rototiller for the farm and be ahead in the long run. I know stars are spoiled lambs, darling, but I work for a living. Okay, I’ll stick it a little longer.”

  Mrs. Ansell had put down the phone. At least I was getting a different sidelight on the glittering goldfish bowl that is Hollywood. I’d always thought publicity was the seed it fed on, but apparently some stars preferred to have a private life. I gathered Mrs. Ansell had felt the same way and was a very discouraged woman finding it not so. Then I heard her call “Come in. Oh, good morning, Sheep. How are you, and what’s this I hear about a murder last night?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  The sound of Sheep Clarke’s voice brought me suddenly back to the whole business of the night before. It had lost its reality, somehow, during the night. Captain Crawford’s knocking at George Gannon’s door had had the effect of removing it from the three people I was interested in—Bill and Sheep and Molly McShane. I’d forgotten that Sheep Clarke was a waiter and that when my breakfast came he’d be the one to bring it. The sound of his voice brought it sharply back.

  “That’s absolutely crazy. A gal around here had a skinful and took a header down those steps. It’s too bad, but there’s no use everybody starting to yell bloody murder. It was that dame down in 31-B. And you don’t even have to yell—a whisper’s enough to get it going all over the place. It’s lousy with cops out there now.”

  “She can yell or whisper or anything else,” Mrs. Ansell said. “All I wish is she’d turn her lights out at night. I’ll have to get a bathroom shade if she doesn’t. My door doesn’t stay closed, and I kept waking up every ten minutes. She certainly entertains at odd hours. My next-door neighbor was down there at three.”

  “Mrs. Latham?”

  “No, the man in 101. He about scared the daylights out of me, stumbling down behind the patios. I wouldn’t have heard him if the light hadn’t kept me awake. And then Molly—”

  “Molly?” Sheep’s voice had been surprised at the thought that it was me. It was sharpened with anxiety now.

  “Molly. At least I guess she’d been down there. She was halfway down the steps, at half-past four—crying. I didn’t know whether to go out or not, but Morry came along just then. He took off his coat and put it around her. He’s a sweet guy. I don’t know what this hotel would do without him. He took her back toward her room. You and Bill ought to do something, Sheep. Your dream child’s pretty unhappy. You’d better look into it.”

  The picture of the tiger kitten, claws drawn, reduced to lonely tears, submitting docilely to the gnarled kindliness of the old night watchman at four-thirty in the morning, was disturbing in more ways than one. Chiefly it was just the fact of her presence there. There wasn’t any doubt that Captain Crawford had left an observer on the spot. He was too shrewd not to have, after his comments on Mrs. Kersey’s lighting effects. George Gannon at least had had the good sense to slip around the back way under cover of the shrubbery. Molly should have done the same. And if she’d talked to Mrs. Kersey the way she did to me when she thought I was the lady, Bill and Sheep would probably be visiting her in the County jail before the day was over.

  I got up and put on my dressing-gown to wait for Sheep to bring my breakfast. The sound of my moving around must have reminded Mrs. Ansell that her closet door was open. I heard her close it, and when the phone rang again it was a distant buzz. I was a little sorry. If she kept the closet door closed I’d never know whether she ever got to talk to Miss Turner or not—and I’d be deprived of a seeing-eye, and a friendly one, apparently, since she’d reported to Sheep rather than to the police. On the whole it seemed to me that Molly McShane had a fairly wide circle of chaperones. If Mrs. Ansell and Rose, the maid, were aware of Sheep and Bill’s interest in her, it was fairly certain all of the more or less permanent guests and employees knew it too. Why she should need any further guardianship, it was difficult to see, though it’s no doubt a wise provision of California law in general.

  I was hoping Sheep and Bill had abandoned their fantastic idea that I would have myself constituted her official overseer when Sheep knocked and came in with my tray. He was so sober-faced that tor a moment I wavered. If anything I could do within reason would bring back the infectious grin he’d had when I first saw him, and relieve the load on his mind, which was no doubt equally heavy on Bill’s, perhaps I really ought to do it. It seemed a shame to have their “deal,” which had been so much fun, go so sour all of a sudden.

  “About this guardianship business, Sheep,” I began.

  He shook his head. “Too late.”

  “Too late?”

  He nodded as he put my tray down on the coffee table and handed me the check.

  “Is it Mrs. Kersey?”

  “No. Just the general mess. I met Captain Crawford out there when I was coming in. He had the autopsy report. She tripped, all right, and it wasn’t on any vine. There’s a mark on her instep and they’re hunting a piece of hemp cord. The vine was a stall. Mrs. Kersey’s trying to tell them she’s psychic. That’s her story, and Crawford says he doesn’t see why she’d want to lie about it. He figures it must have been put there for her, so why should she lie? Anyway, we think it’s better to just lie low. So keep quiet about it, will you, Mrs. Latham? And I’ve got to go. I’ve got tour more breakfasts to get out.”

  At the door he turned. “Bill won’t be here till noon. He’s got three classes. Crawford let him off the morning line-up.”

  “Where’s Molly?”

  “They’re shooting over in the Valley today. She’ll be back around one, I guess. Mr. Gannon’s producing, but he’s not going over. He’s still in bed. And he’ll be tearing out the telephone wires if I don’t get his two-minute eggs and boiled milk in to him. I’ll see you later.”

  I had the feeling that it was less his anxiety to keep Mr. George Gannon from flying into a frenzy than it was his own desire to get away. He’d scarcely closed the door when he opened it again.

  “Yeah, she’s in here.”

  I
heard an ecstatic “Darling!” and Lucille Gannon burst into the room.

  Chapter Eleven: Woman in a rage

  “GRACE! HOW wonderful to see you—I didn’t even go home to change, Tell me what happened! They’re all making like deal mutes down in the lobby. We just got the tail end of it on the plane when somebody switched the program. I was furious… Darling, you look divine! I always look like hell in the morning.”

  As a matter of fact, she did, somewhat. But I doubted if the time of day had much to do with it. She was a lot thinner than she’d been when I saw her in Washington in the spring. Her beige gabardine suit was trim and well cur, but it made her eyes seem paler than their usual almost cat’s-eye amber, and the pancake sun-tan make-up didn’t cover the lines around her mouth and chin as well as a few extra over all pounds of flesh would have done. Her chestnut hair was pulled Chinese tight and she had enough heavy gold chains around her neck and wrist to pass as the mine owner’s favorite slave girl anywhere. But still I thought I was glad to see her. I didn’t know what trying to keep up with Hollywood glamour could do to a woman who’d always been glamour personified in the less competitive circles she’d moved in around Washington, and Upperville, Virginia.

  “Palm Springs was ghastly; it rained all the time. But do tell me what happened, Grace. Then I’ll tell you a secret. Gee Gee’s right here in the hotel! He’s working like crazy on a new script. But he’s dying to meet you. He’s completely incommunicado. It’s the only way he gets any work done. He always works in a hotel—he says it’s the only really impersonal place in the world, the only place where nobody can disturb you. So I just pick up and go someplace.”

  She’d been looking at my breakfast. “I’m going to get some coffee. I had a cup on the plane, but I’m starving.” She whipped over to the phone. That done, she flopped down in the big yellow chair across from me. “Now tell me, Grace. What happened? I won’t say another word.”