Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2)

by Anita Blackmon

  Stephen Lansing smiled. “We might as well make the best of it since here we are,” he said and strolled over to where Kathleen Adair was hovering solicitously above her mother’s chair.

  The girl turned her back on him. “My mother isn’t well,” she told the first policeman. “She should be in bed.”

  “I’m all right, darling,” murmured Mrs Adair, though she looked terrible.

  Mary Lawson put her hand on her niece’s shoulder. “Someone must have stolen the knife,” she faltered.

  “Oh sure,” said Polly with a bright unsteady smile.

  Howard cleared his throat nervously. “Of course, someone stole the knife,” he said.

  Hilda Anthony smiled unpleasantly. “Naturally! Even an amateur murderess is too smart these days to be caught red handed with the deadly weapon.”

  Polly glanced down at her small chubby hands and shivered convulsively. Wincing, Howard moved closer to her and glared at the Anthony woman. Ella Trotter clutched at my sleeve.

  “There-there are stains on Polly’s palm,” she whispered in a faint voice.

  I gulped and nodded. Neither of us could bear to look at Mary, who stood over by the window, staring blindly at the dark office building next door, her fingers twisting and turning over each other as if it were her hands that bore that terrible stain.

  “It seems to me we should be on the scene, Sophie, looking after things,” murmured Cyril Fancher, plucking at his underlip.

  “No telling what’s happening to the hotel.”

  Sophie sighed. “The police have their own ideas, love,” she said soothingly. “We ought to thank goodness they were willing to let Pinky and Clarence carry on as usual.”

  Stephen Lansing stooped and picked up something off the floor. “You dropped your bracelet, Mrs Adair,” he murmured.

  The Adair girl pushed his hand away with a swift angry gesture. “That isn’t Mother’s,” she said.

  “It’s mine!” cried Ella Trotter in a startled voice.

  Stephen Lansing came across the room, dangling the glittering bauble on his middle finger. “It’s a good thing I heard it click when it hit the floor,” he said. “Someone might have stepped on it.”

  “But I haven’t had the bracelet on in weeks,” protested Ella.

  “It’s in my jewellery box – or I’d have sworn it was.”

  “Nonsense!” I said irritably. “Your memory is never reliable, Ella, except at the bridge table.”

  “Says you,” snapped Ella, who has a regrettable weakness for what she calls smart cracks.

  “My head aches,” wailed Lottie Mosby suddenly. “I think I’m going to be ill. Oh, Dan!” She caught at his hand, and he put his arm about her.

  His eyes were still bloodshot, but he looked sober, soberer than I had seen him in months. “Steady, honey,” he said quite tenderly. “It’s a rotten shame, but I’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry.”

  “Oh, Dan!” she wailed again, staring up at him as if she had had a glimpse of Paradise Lost.

  Stephen Lansing offered the Anthony woman a cigarette which she accepted with a wry grin. “Too bad,” murmured she, “that our late date was interrupted.”

  I saw both Polly and Kathleen Adair stiffen, but it was toward Kathleen the Lansing man looked, and at the expression on her face he winced.

  “Isn’t it?” he drawled, smiling at Hilda Anthony. “But there’s always another night.”

  She shivered and looked over her shoulder. “I wonder,” she said thoughtfully.

  We waited almost two hours before the inspector deigned to transfer his attention to the parlour. I do not know exactly what I expected the chief of the Homicide Bureau to look like, but I was not prepared for the dapper young man in the smart checked suit.

  He wore a blue foulard tie to match his eyes and he had round cheeks as smooth as a girl’s and a cleft chin. He reminded me of a juvenile male lead in a stock company.

  “Inspector Bunyan,” he announced himself, surveying us all pleasantly. “Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  “I’ll bet,” muttered Howard.

  Inspector Homer Bunyan, having taken his time about arriving, also took it about proceeding to action. He pre-empted the large library table in a corner which commanded the room, sat himself down on a straight chair, produced a fountain pen and a neat leather notebook, leafed through some pages which he had already filled, and finally allowed his ingenuous blue eyes to travel slowly over every face in the room.

  “Get on with it, can’t you?” growled Dan Mosby.

  “Hang onto yourself,” Howard advised him. “That’s what he’s trying to do, wear us down.”

  Inspector Bunyan regarded him leisurely. “Am I to assume that you have something to conceal, Mr-er-”

  “Warren,” snapped Howard. “And if I have anything to conceal, it’s up to you to find it out.”

  Inspector Bunyan smiled. “Exactly.”

  Quite suddenly his blue eyes were less ingenuous, his round face shrewd, if not menacing. I never afterward doubted that Inspector Bunyan was a force, however belied by his appearance.

  When he turned his gaze on me it was precisely as though it were a gimlet boring into my conscience. To my shame, I admit that my hands tightened on the edge of my chair and for a moment my mouth went terribly dry.

  “Can you advance any theory – Miss Adams, isn’t it? – Why this man should have come to his death in your apartment?” he asked.

  I swallowed hard. “None whatever.”

  “You were not acquainted with him?” He continued to look at me. I had a feeling he was turning my thoughts inside out. It infuriated me to have my face colour painfully.

  Pursing his lips, Inspector Bunyan hunted for a certain page in his notebook and added something to it with what struck me as offensive gusto.

  He then transferred his attention to Sophie. It was some satisfaction to my self-respect to see that Sophie’s plump face also turned a mottled red under his scrutiny and she appeared suddenly far from happy on the love seat which she was occupying with her husband.

  Inspector Bunyan referred to another page in his notebook. “You are the proprietor of the Richelieu?”

  Sophie inclined her head, and Cyril, catching the inspector’s eye, wriggled uncomfortably and then looked quickly away, his pale eyebrows twitching like the feelers of a caterpillar.

  “What do you know about the late James Reid, of New Orleans?” demanded the inspector.

  “Nothing,” said Sophie.

  “Except he registered here a week ago tomorrow,” supplemented Cyril, as if he were trying to curry favour with the authorities by being helpful.

  The inspector once more consulted his notes. I realized then that he had by no means been idle while we were waiting for him.

  Each of us had our special dossier in that neat black notebook which we were all to come to dread before we finished with Inspector Bunyan.

  “You never saw him before he registered here at the hotel?” asked the inspector.

  “Never!” said Cyril with undisguised fervour.

  The inspector frowned. “But you did tell one of your employees, Mr Fancher, that the man never set foot in New Orleans.”

  Cyril gave a sickly smile. “He thought Canal Street has boats on it, like Venice.”

  “I see,” murmured the inspector, making a series of minute hieroglyphics on Cyril’s page.

  Sophie swiftly came to his defence. “If we were accused of murdering someone every time we remarked upon a guest’s conduct, we’d keep you busy, Inspector,” she said dryly.

  “I don’t doubt it,” murmured Ella Trotter with a sour smile.

  Sophie bridled. “We don’t gossip about our guests without cause, Mrs Trotter.”

  “I hope we can depend on that,” said Ella, determined on the last word.

  The inspector again allowed his gaze to rest pleasantly on one of us, then the other. “Some of you knew the dead man,” he said in a voice that permitted no contradi
ction. When no one spoke, he went on softly, “Some of you knew all about him, why he was here, where he came from, and what brought him.”

  Still nobody spoke.

  “It would save a great deal of unnecessary inconvenience if those who have any information about James Reid would voluntarily give it to the police. Rest assured” – his voice grew silkier – “before we’re done we’ll get it.”

  “The velvet hand in the iron glove,” misquoted Howard in his most sarcastic manner.

  The inspector smiled. “Did you know James Reid, Mr Warren?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you were on the fourth floor between seven-thirty and eight tonight.”

  Howard grinned defiantly. “Was I?”

  The inspector glanced at Lottie Mosby, who instinctively drew closer within the circle of her husband’s arm. “Mrs-ah-Mosby,” pursued the inspector, “were you acquainted with the late Mr Reid?”

  “Of course she wasn’t,” growled Dan Mosby.

  The inspector made a little gesture toward Lottie. “Please speak for yourself.”

  “No! I didn’t know him!” she gasped.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Listen here,” exploded young Mosby, “you can’t bully my wife. I won’t stand for it.”

  Apparently he spoke to thin air. “You say you didn’t know James Reid, Mrs Mosby. Yet you left a note in his box at the desk shortly before six tonight,” said the inspector.

  “I didn’t! I didn’t!” Lottie buried her face on her husband’s shoulder, and he glared about him like a baited bull.

  “That’s a lie!” he cried. “I don’t care who told you!”

  “And where, Mr Mosby,” purred the inspector, “were you between seven-thirty and eight tonight?”

  “In the lobby, reading the paper.”

  “Except for ten minutes when you sneaked off up the stairs.”

  “That’s a lie too.”

  The inspector, without debating the point, passed on to Kathleen Adair and her mother. “Perhaps you ladies are willing to admit to an acquaintance with the unfortunate Mr Reid?”

  “No, of course not. Why should we?” asked the girl.

  “He was seen this morning emerging from your room.”

  Kathleen Adair went white. I expected little Mrs Adair to faint again, but she merely stared at the inspector like a small bird charmed by a snake.

  “If that man was in our room, we know nothing about it,” cried the girl passionately. “We were downstairs in the lobby all morning. We can prove it by Miss Adams.”

  The inspector once more treated me to the gimlet of his eyes.

  “You are quite sure you can shed no light on the man who was foully murdered in your suite tonight, Miss Adams? After all, something took him there,” murmured Inspector Bunyan.

  “I have already told you I did not know Mr Reid,” I said with all the hauteur I could muster, which is, as a rule, no laughing matter, though in this case it made little, if any, impression.

  “So you have,” mused the inspector. “Nevertheless, he was familiar enough with you to return to you on a certain occasion one of your more or less intimate possessions.”

  It was my turn to stare helplessly at the inspector. “You mean my-my...”

  I found it difficult to continue, and the inspector smiled at me gently. “Do you usually carry your spectacle case with you, Miss Adams?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, almost never. Right?”

  “Right,” I said with a feeble grimace.

  “Isn’t it a trifle peculiar that this man, of whom you profess to know nothing, should have recognized a spectacle case which rarely, if ever, leaves your bedroom?”

  I gave him a withering glance. “If you are trying to insinuate something scandalous, Inspector Bunyan, please allow me to tell you that my life is an open book.”

  “No wonder she’s a disappointed old maid,” said Hilda Anthony.

  The inspector frowned and looked for the first time a little nettled, but the Anthony woman merely smiled mockingly when he surveyed her with mingled resentment and admiration.

  “If it’s my turn, Inspector,” she said blithely, “I did not know the murdered man. I never spoke to him or he to me, and while the employees in this house are a bunch of snooping busybodies, I defy any of them to tell you the contrary.”

  “No,” said the inspector with what I took for regret, “no one has said anything of the kind about you, Mrs-er-Anthony.”

  I sniffed. “But James Reid was watching her from the stairs while we were at dinner tonight.”

  She grinned at me. “Men always watch a pretty woman, Miss Adams, though of course you wouldn’t know about that.”

  The inspector hastily consulted his notebook, a little as though he needed something to distract his attention from the Anthony’s opulent curves. Apparently he came up with Stephen Lansing’s name.

  “You are a salesman, I believe, of cosmetics,” he murmured.

  Stephen laughed. “Guilty.”

  “Did you know the unlamented Mr Reid?”

  “Nope.”

  “Positive?”

  “Positive!”

  The inspector made a little drawing on the side of the notebook.

  “You were in the Sally Ray Beauty Shop from four to five this afternoon, Mr Lansing, demonstrating a new permanent-wave pad?”

  Stephen Lansing’s eyes narrowed. “Yep.”

  “At five minutes to five a man in the Sally Ray Shop called this hotel and got in touch with 511, the room occupied by Mr Reid, of New Orleans.”

  “And so?” murmured Stephen Lansing with a chuckle that rang anything except true to my ears.

  “Did you telephone to Mr Reid this afternoon?”

  “Nope.”

  The inspector sighed, slowly riffled through the pages of his notebook, and asked, “None of you cares to amend your statement? It will in the long run save you as well as myself a great deal of useless difficulty if you speak the truth, here and now, freely and without reservation.”

  No one said anything. The inspector sighed again and glanced lingeringly from Mary Lawson’s drawn white face to her niece’s bright twisted smile.

  “It was the knife from your desk set, Mrs Lawson,” he said very quietly.

  Mary all but wrung her hands. “I haven’t killed anyone!”

  “And I didn’t even know who was killed until I was dragged upstairs,” Polly cried.

  The inspector pursed his lips. “Yet you tried to run away with the weapon, Miss Lawson.”

  She was trembling. “Someone threw it out the window. I was on the sidewalk, waiting for Mr Lansing to return. All at once something clattered at my feet. It was – it was –”

  “The knife from your aunt’s desk set?”

  “And there was blood on it. I got some on my hand. Then I heard the police siren and I-I lost my head and ran.”

  “Ah!” murmured the inspector. He waited a minute. “Can you prove you did not follow Mr Lansing back into the hotel, Miss Lawson?”

  Polly’s teeth were chattering. “Pinky was at the desk. He would have seen me.”

  “Mr Dodge says that at about a quarter of eight he was in the telephone booth, taking a long-distance call from Memphis, asking for a room reservation. He cannot swear who passed through the lobby at that time.”

  “But there were others in the lobby,” cried Polly. “Miss Adams for one.”

  “I should certainly have seen Miss Lawson had she re-entered the hotel,” I said indignantly.

  The inspector regarded me thoughtfully. “Did you see Mr Mosby when he cautiously circled around you and made his way upstairs, Miss Adams?”

  “No,” I was forced to admit.

  “Did you see Mr Stephen Lansing when he re-entered the hotel?”

  “N-no.”

  The inspector shrugged his shoulders significantly, and Hilda Anthony laughed. “How it must gripe Miss Adams not to have eyes in the back of her head,” she said.
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  “As a matter of fact,” remarked the inspector wearily, “not one of you has an ironclad alibi from seven-thirty to eight, which is as near as we can fix the hour of the crime.”

  “How absurd!” I protested. “I was in the lobby continuously from dinner until I discovered the body.”

  “Provided he was dead when you discovered him,” murmured the inspector. “There seems to be quite a hiatus between the time you went up in the elevator and the time your screams aroused the hotel, Miss Adams.”

  “I-I was shocked, unable to scream, unable to do anything for some minutes,” I stammered.

  “Who wouldn’t have been?” demanded Ella angrily.

  The inspector made some little dots on his notebook. “How long would you say it was, Miss Adams, after you found the lifeless body of Mr James Reid swinging from the chandelier in your suite before you remembered to scream?”

  “I don’t know,” I said shortly. “I had other things to think of than preparing a timetable for the police.”

  Again the inspector submitted us all to a prolonged scrutiny.

  “Where were you, Mrs Mosby, during the fatal hour?” he asked softly.

  “In my room.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the fourth floor?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “And you, Mrs Lawson?”

  “Alone in my room.”

  “Also on the fourth floor?”

  “Yes.”

  The inspector shook his head. “No,” he said, “none of you who were present in the house at the time of the crime has an alibi for the suspect interval. That is why I had you detained, why I am compelled to regard each of you with more or less suspicion.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” cried Dan Mosby furiously. “We didn’t even know the man. Permanent guests in a hotel like this never pay any attention to transients. They’re here today, gone tomorrow. Why pick on us because a man happens to get knocked off in a public house in which we happen to live? Ten to one you’ll find he was followed here by somebody who had good cause to kill him. Maybe he’s a gangster or a sneak thief.”

  “No,” said Inspector Bunyan, “he wasn’t followed here nor is he a gangster or a sneak thief, and he didn’t just happen to get knocked off. The man was coldly and brutally murdered by” – he paused impressively – “someone who has been living in this hotel for quite a while.”