The other two blinked. “What the hell?”
“The gent who bugged that alarm was an amateur. He didn’t have any materials for his little racket. He had to take what was at hand. Do you see the hole in the end?”
Berthold exclaimed: “Hell’s bells. It’s the tag off of a hotel key.”
“Yeah, but it’s all filed clean,” Immerman said. “Half the hotels in town use those.”
“Filing marks off metal isn’t what it once was,” said the Marquis. “I know a chemist claims to be able to bring them back to life.”
“Oh-oh.”
The Marquis finished his drink, set down the glass. “All right, gentlemen—let’s hit it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Death on the Stairs
IT was not till he was riding southward in a cab, he realized glumly, that he had a chance to think of little Sid Lajoie. He had been a pretty decent little guy—with a soft spot in his heart for Marty Marquis. It was devastating to ponder on the fact that the little money-lender had died because of that friendship. For Lajoie knew his Broadway—knew that only a fool trusted any of its denizens. It was doubtful if he would have allowed himself to be maneuvered into a position of danger by anybody, save one he thought to be the Marquis.
He was having plenty of trouble plunging back into harness. After a month among the elite, he had a nostalgic revulsion to the brutal, greedy roughnecks who made up his world—or so he put it.
This was the Marquis’ one blind-spot. He liked to consider himself as a polished, quiet gentleman, directing this force of man-hunters with velvet words, himself above it all. This, of course, was not even close to the truth. Carefully, painfully, exhaustively, over a period of years, he had cultivated polish, a soft voice, quiet, immaculate appearance, good taste—but he was still a mugg from Avenue A. He always would be, though he would mayhem the man that said so. It never occurred to him that only a mugg could live in his shoes. It was his secret delight to be mistaken for a banker, a doctor, a stockbroker, or even a merchant—of the better class, of course.
Apart from that vagary, it is doubtful if there were a man with fewer illusions—or fewer friends. And the real truth was that the loss of one, who came as close as any to that category, at the hands of a thief, depressed him more than he would admit.
His black-gloved hand closed grimly on the little metal disk in his pocket. If this slim clue would only disclose its secret!
For some reason, New York’s expensively equipped crime laboratory does not seem to hold the respect of ranking officers. Most of them have connections with private scientists—police buffs—to whom they bring their problems. For six years, the Marquis had laid his riddles at the feet of an Italian, head of a commercial testing laboratory and private experimenter in forensics. He had, at his home in Greenwich Village, a well-equipped little laboratory of his own.
It was when they were exactly halfway there that the cabbie suddenly turned a concerned face over his shoulder and said: “Hey, Marty—would you be being tailed?”
The Marquis swung round in his seat. “Where?”
“That blue Buick sedan. It’s been hanging back about a block and a half, all the way down.”
THE Marquis saw the car, loping quietly in their wake—a three-year-old model. The streets were bare enough at this hour so that it stood out. It was too far back to make out the license number or the number of occupants.
“Watch me lose him,” the hacker said.
“Do and I’ll kill you.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to lose him. I want to catch him. Keep going.”
They were on Seventh Avenue, rattling over the snarl of car tracks on Fourteenth. The blue Buick paced them stolidly, down to Greenwich.
When they were a block below Greenwich, the Marquis said: “Stop here and see what he does—”
As if the driver of the car behind had heard him, the blue Buick swung instantly left, went scooting across the side street with a long rattle of acceleration.
“He’s gone to parallel us,” the cabby said excitedly. “He’ll go down Sixth—”
“Fair enough. Out over to Sixth and pin him.”
They spurted. They angled swiftly through Waverly, nosed out onto Sixth expectantly—and the blue Buick had vanished. It did not show up again. They parked, motor running, for ten minutes, and there was no sign of the car.
“Something tells me you’ve been going to movies, Mac,” the Marquis said. “Go on, get over to Barrow—the address I first gave you.”
“I still think they was follyin’ us!”
“All right. They were following us.”
THE house in which Brossi, the chemist, lived and had his laboratory, was an old, dreary-looking five stories of rococo gray stone. However, like many such in the Village, its interior had been renovated lavishly and tastefully. It was a fairly narrow house and Brossi leased the top two floors.
The street was utterly quiet and in thick blackness at this hour, of course, when the Marquis paid off his cab and went up the four or five flat, protruding stone steps. He had a key to the front door and this let him into a dimly lit vestibule where four brass mailboxes surmounted bells. He gave a few jabs to the chemist’s bell, while he fitted his key to the inner door, then stepped into a narrow, maroon-carpeted hall.
A dim, octagonal globe glowed in the ceiling. Half the hall was the flight of carpeted stairs, its curving, polished, dark-wood banister gleaming softly.
Before he had the door closed, he heard the sleepy tones of a man’s voice, vaguely irritated, coming from a spot down the hall, behind the staircase: “Yeah, yeah….That’s right….No, we got nobody by that name here. Spell it again.”
There was a second of silence. The man was evidently talking to a telephone at the head of the cellar stairs. The Marquis walked toward the flight leading upward, till the unseen voice said: “Marquis? No, never heard of him. What? Lieutenant Martin Marquis? No. What?”
The Marquis blinked. He turned aside, went down the hall, a line cutting his forehead.
He rounded the bulk of the staircase quickly, into the space between the staircase and the back wall of the hall.
Orange roar lashed from the shadows. His cheek went on fire, one ear went deaf. He staggered back, hit the wall—and the split-second was enough to snap his head clear, his muscles into action.
Almost the instant he hit the wall, he dived forward. He had one glimpse of the peaked-capped, masked man above the cellar stairs, the gun in one hand, the other holding open the board door to the descending staircase. The Marquis dived under the second thunderous explosion, brought a vicious uppercut from his toes that nearly ripped the man’s head from his shoulders. The man yelled, fell backward, slipped on the top step and lost all footing, clutching crazily at the thin door as he fell.
The Marquis, grabbing savagely for him, ran face first into the edge of the door, saw ten thousand stars. He fell back, and the other’s wild clutch yanked the door closed as he went headlong, thumping, crashing, marking his progress down the stairs.
The Marquis whipped a pistol from his hip, snatched at the door handle. Like most Village basement doors, it had a spring lock on it, on the stair side. The Marquis raised a foot, slammed it at the lock, and thunder roared in the basement. A sliver of wood shot out of the door a foot from his face. The man below was still in action.
The Marquis jumped aside, swung hot eyes around. The wall ended in a blank plaster barrier. Then a door fifteen feet up the hall opened, and a sleepy, gray-haired man poked out a curious alarmed face.
The Marquis swung on him. “Does your apartment run to the rear of the house?” He was running toward the open door even before the man stammered, “Ye-yes.” He shoved him aside unceremoniously and raced through his living-room into a bedroom at the rear.
The windows at the back of the bedroom were open. He snapped off the light as he passed it, put his head through the open window. He was just in time to see a dark form whip ov
er the fence at the back of the little court behind the house. The Marquis fired once—and then the blackness swallowed the fugitive.
The Marquis turned back, stony-eyed, repocketed his pistol. He walked on, gloved hands in Chesterfield pockets, met the apartment owner, wide-eyed in the hall and said, “Thank you—police.” He stood grim-jawed, in the hall, for perhaps a minute before he went stolidly up.
CURIOUS faces peered from every doorway, as he mounted the three flights to Brossi’s apartment and the giant Italian, too, was at his door as the Marquis trudged up. “What! You? What happened your face?”
“A little powder that’ll wash off. Where’s your phone?”
When he had reported to the precinct police, he turned back and gave the disk to the big, glowing-faced Latin, told him what he wanted.
“A cinch,” the chemist said. “You wash up and wait here.” He vanished up the inside stairway, as the Marquis walked into the bathroom.
He was startled, puzzled, furious. The fury was at himself for being caught in a mental fog. Only the deadness of the carpet downstairs had saved his life. The crouched killer had been unable to time exactly the moment to expect the Marquis under his gun. It was too obvious now that the murderer had been following him, as the cabby had perceived—followed him till it became apparent where he was going, then speeded ahead to get there first. After eight yars, everyone knew of the Marquis’ connection with Brossi. It would take no master-mind to guess that he might be going there.
But why would the killer want him dead? There was something strange there. For, if the killer did happen to know the exact situation—that Sprackling was more than willing to pin the killing on the Marquis—certainly making a corpse of the Marquis would be one way of doing it easier. However, that would only be a logical thought, if the Marquis had no alibi.
Somehow, it didn’t add up. He could hardly find anything that did add up— except that this had been a deliberate attempt to blow his brains out.
It was bad—and also good. Bad, because he would have to tread warily, watch every shadow from here in, till he could get some light on why his death was necessary. Good, because that necessity might, even if all else failed, bring the killer back within reach. Even if the brass disk—the only shred of a clue so far—did prove a dead end, there was the chance of the murderer coming back to try again for the Marquis. The Marquis made a gentle promise that the man would find him ready, next time.
The clue—the brass disk—even though he had identified it correctly, did seem to lead to a dead end, though an interesting one.
The Italian chemist presently came down again in his bathrobe, with an X-ray picture. “Right again, Sherlock,” he told the Marquis. “Examine that.”
“That” was an X-ray print in a clip. It showed a round disk with a hole in one end and, plainly visible, shadowy letters and figures. They read—San Mario Hotel :: 357.
CHAPTER FOUR
She Married a Madman
WHEN a taxi dropped him on exclusive Fifty-seventh Street, and he walked into the quiet, expensive little lobby of the green-and-gold hotel, the first person he saw was big Johnny Berthold.
The hotel was one of the ten-dollar-a-day and up—mostly up—hostelries. Its low-ceilinged lobby was thickly carpeted. The green-marble, semi-circular desk was fronted by brass-barred little windows like bank-tellers’ cages, save for the one modest space where the desk lay bare to the ceiling—the registration niche. Nothing so vulgar as a register, however, was in sight.
Coming up to that opening, the Marquis saw big Johnny back behind one of the closed grilles, his head propped on one big palm, gloomily sorting over a pile of registration cards, jotting down notations.
The Marquis said, “Hey,” quietly and the big blond Newfoundland looked round. Simultaneously, from a half-open walnut door in the wall, a pointed-faced, shining-haired young man in short black coat and striped trousers stepped smartly out.
“Oh, hello, chief,” Berthold said and dropped his pen. To the counter-jumper, he added, “Never mind, Waldo.”
The brown eyes of the clerk looked shrewdly at the Marquis for a moment, then the man vanished again through the door. Big Johnny came over and grinned. “You like a nice room and bath?”
“What are you doing here?”
“We had a killing here a couple weeks ago, while you were away and I was just doing a little routine. What did you want me for, chief? Want I should get my hat?”
“I don’t want you, you elephant. I want to know who lives in Room Three Fifty-seven.”
The big man’s eyes widened. “There ain’t nobody lives there now. That’s where we had the killing. They moved his wife to another suite.”
“What’s the story on the killing?”
“Eh? Well, this Ludwig and his wife—he’s a lumber man from Detroit—had a prowler come in their suite. Ludwig tried to fight with him and got a slug in the head for his pains. We ain’t got a prayer yet.”
“Was one of the keys missing to the suite?”
“Well, yeah. We figured the prowler must of took that from Ludwig’s clothes, along with a handful of nice, fresh hundred-dollar bills and a jeweled watch that he got off the dead man.”
“Before or after he killed him?”
“After. He tied the wife up and gagged her while he fanned the joint.”
“Nobody heard the shot?”
“Not in this flea-bag, chief. The place is soundproofed within an inch of its life.”
“Description?”
“Uh-uh. Masked. Except that he was about my size and had a lot of blond hair. He wore a cap and it spilled out from under and he was dirty-lookin’. Why?”
“I guess it was part of the same mob that tried to job me tonight. That brass disk they used to bug the alarm came off this Ludwig’s key.”
“No!”
The Marquis frowned thoughtfully for a minute. “You’ve got nowhere at all?
“No. Immie told me to run back through the register and see who had that suite before. Maybe we’d get a break and find some fishy-smelling guy who could of had a key made way back. Immie got a piece of cloth that was stuck under Ludwig’s lodge-pin—figured it caught on the prowler’s sleeve when he fanned him and jerked a little tuft off. He couldn’t get anywhere with it. And we, were lucky enough to get the serial numbers of the C-notes that was stole.”
“This Mrs. Ludwig is still in the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Any reason why she didn’t go home?”
“Well, to tell the truth, she said she was sticking around to help—to identify the prowler if we caught him. If you ask me she thinks we’ll drop the whole thing, if she goes.”
“If she’s that helpful, maybe she’d stand for being got out of bed now.”
“Maybe,” Berthold conceded. He turned and yelled, “Oswald—I mean Waldo!” and the immaculate little room-clerk reappeared.
“You call her, Johnny, and tell her what’s what.”
OVER the clerk’s disapproving head-shaking, Johnny insisted on being connected to Suite 212. Presently, he said into the phone, awkwardly: “This is Detective Berthold, ma’am. I sure am sorry to disturb you, but my chief is very anxious to see you in a hurry about that—well, about what happened to your husband. We was wondering if you’d mind if he came up now. Huh?” He listened intently, then hastily covered the transmitter with a big hand. “It’s O.K. She just wants a minute to get dress—”
He hastily ducked back to the mouthpiece. “Well, that’s very kind of you, ma’am. He’ll be—No, not Mr. Immerman, ma’am. This is the real chief—Lieutenant Marquis, hisself. He just got back from—Eh?” The big man’s face wrinkled ludicrously. Again he blocked the mouthpiece, whispered hoarsely. “Something screwy. Now she’s decided she won’t see—” He flushed, uncovered the instrument again. “Well, now, ma’am, it’s kind of important, y’see. Well, sure, I know you don’t care to be disturbed—”
The Marquis snapped, “Waldo!” and the desk clerk
came around the switchboard. “Give me a pass-key—quick!”
The clerk gasped. “But I couldn’t—”
“Keep talking,” the Marquis snapped at Johnny. “You—give me that key or I’ll cram your ears down your throat.”
The clerk swallowed, snaked a key from a peg under the desk. The Marquis snapped at Johnny: “Keep her talking. I want to hear her voice,” and ran to the elevator.
On the second floor he went down green and flamingo corridors, softly lighted, soundless, till he was before the door of Suite 212.
Inside, he heard a woman’s voice say in exasperation: “But I tell you, I refuse to see him tonight. I have retired and—”
There was a puzzled knot in his forehead. He did not recall ever having heard the voice before.
He got his key in the door soundlessly, turned it, holding the door tight. The woman was saying, “No! No!” in vehement fury as he eased it open a few inches and looked through a tiny foyer into a living-room. She was in his line of sight now.
HE saw a lovely blond girl of close to thirty in a white evening dress. This was of note, considering that she was urgently claiming to have retired. Still holding the French phone, she stamped a slippered foot and the movement turned her a little. Her blond, peach-like face was flushed, her velvet-blue eyes angry. The dress she wore fitted like wall-paper, cut breathtakingly low to show her full, firm breasts. She had a lovely figure. “Surely, I’ll see him tomorrow,” she said, “and not before!” She slammed the instrument into its cradle.
She sank down on a green armchair and pressed a handkerchief to her lips. Her white-ringed eyes were on the phone and her hand was shaking. She reached out blindly to a coffee-table beside her and fumbled a cigarette from a box, snapped a lighter to flame and lit it, taking deep, long puffs. She sat like that for a full minute. Then she got up, throwing her head back, shaking her hair into place—and saw the Marquis.
He was in the living-room by now, having threaded the foyer, his hard hat held across his stomach, his blue eyes grim, searching, on the girl’s face.
Every drop of color left her cheeks, left the disks of rouge pale and alone. She gasped: “What—what are you doing here?”
The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1 Page 6
