“But she hasn’t been here since she went off duty at lunch yesterday,” I persisted.
He was trembling. “I tell you, she never left here.”
I stared at him incredulously. “But –”
“I was watching for her.”
“I know, but –”
“I could see the employees’ entrance from where I stood.”
“Perhaps so, but –”
“She never came out of the hotel.”
It was then I had my second brain storm, one that came so close to costing me my life that I can scarcely bear to think of it even yet.
“Merciful heavens!” I gasped, grasping the back of a chair to steady myself.
I have said I never forget anything, though I may mislay it for a while, and I was recalling many obscure and curious incidents which had puzzled me at the time but to which I had been unable to find the key; only now they were falling into a pattern, a pattern so sinister it made my brain reel.
“Have-have you reported your wife’s disappearance to the police?” I faltered.
He paled. “Then you, too, think something awful has happened to her?” he whispered.
I could not speak, and he put his hand to his quivering mouth.
“I haven’t done anything,” he gasped, “except walk the street up and down, up and down, between here and the corner, watching for her – for her to come out.”
I was trembling all over. There were a dozen things I wanted to do at once. I flung a distracted glance at the lobby clock. It was a quarter after two. The Coffee Shop had been closed for over twenty minutes. It was then my right eye began to twitch with an acute attack of nerves which it has never got entirely over.
“Wait here,” I cried, shoving Conrad Wilson down into a chair. “Don’t stir till I come back. I want to take you to Inspector Bunyan, but-but there’s something I must do first.”
If only I’m not too late, I thought as I hobbled swiftly through the lobby and out the back into the long corridor which separates the kitchen of the Richelieu Hotel on the left from the Beauty Shop on the right. I dare say I looked pretty much like a wild woman when I thrust my head in at the door where Belle, the dishwasher, and Gene, the chef, were just removing their greasy aprons, preparatory to going out for a few hours before time to start dinner.
“That girl – that waitress Gloria! Has she gone yet?” I demanded jerkily, because I still could not seem to draw a full breath.
Gene stared at me in astonishment, but Belle did not turn a hair at my unprecedented intrusion behind the scenes.
“No ’m, she ain’t gone, Miss Adams,” she said, calmly untying her apron.
“Thank God!” I whispered.
“The other girl left right at two,” Belle went on, “but dat Gloria’s quitting, so she had to wait till Mr Fancher brung her check.”
“Oh!” I wailed, the stitch in my side growing more pronounced.
“Where is she?” Belle glanced at me curiously. “Down in the dressing room, I guess, taking off her uniform. Leastwise I ain’t heard her come up yet.”
I had forgotten that, because of limited kitchen space on the first floor, there was a dressing room of sorts in the basement of the hotel which the waitresses in the Coffee Shop were permitted to use when they changed into street clothes or vice versa.
“She went down to the basement?” I gasped.
“Yas ’m.”
“And you haven’t heard her come up?”
“No ’m.”
For an instant I heard Gloria Larue’s voice as distinctly as I had heard it at breakfast that morning. “When a feller’s got nobody but himself to back his play,” she had said, “he gets used to taking it on the chin.”
My heart was beating in great furious throbs as I turned back to the corridor. It all fitted, fitted perfectly, into a horrible pattern.
I knew at last why so many of the waitresses whom Cyril Fancher employed were on their own with no one to inquire if apparently the earth yawned and swallowed them. I knew, too, why he had discouraged them from talking to the guests, and why they never stayed long at the Richelieu, and why they had all been young and fresh and pretty.
“Please, God,” I prayed as I stumbled down the corridor, “let me be in time.”
I had been in the basement of the Richelieu many times, but not by way of the narrow staircase which opened off the rear hall between the door into the kitchen and the employees’ entry. There is under the lobby a large concrete storage room for trunks and so forth to which I had often descended in the elevator when I had winter furs to put away in mothballs or summer frocks to take out of tissue paper.
I had previously seen for myself that the dark passage to the west of the elevator in the basement ran back toward the rear of the house, and I knew, of course, that there had to be a boiler room and such in the nether regions of the basement. I also, as I have said, had some vague knowledge that the waitresses’ dressing room was down there somewhere.
However, I had never had any occasion to go farther back than the elevator stop, and as I started down the rear stair I had no idea of the layout or where I could expect to find the room to which Gloria Larue had gone. But to my relief both the steep steps and the corridor below were well lighted by a powerful drop bulb on the landing of the staircase which halfway down made an abrupt right-angled turn, so that while you were facing east when you started down, you were headed due west on the second flight.
I had no difficulty locating the entrance to the boiler room. It was well to the front of the basement, though at that distance from the bulb on the landing the corridor was dim and shadowy. Nor did I have any trouble discovering the dressing room. As I came around the bend in the stairs it was directly before me, next to the laundry chute. The door was closed, but I could hear the water running in the lavatory.
“Thank God,” I cried, “she’s still there!”
At that instant the powerful lamp above my head went out, plunging me into a blackness so intense I could not have seen my hand before me had I had the strength to lift it. I believe my heart, the very blood in my veins, stood still. For a second I could not move, I could not even think.
I was conscious of stealthy footsteps near me, nearer and nearer, and of a ghastly panting like some animal, but whether from below or above I could not tell for the roar of my blood in my ears.
And then with a choking sound that was an aborted shriek, I whirled around, flinging my arms out to ward off that nameless horror converging upon me. The next instant those dreadful squeezing hands were at my throat, grinding, clawing, digging deeper and deeper into my windpipe.
17
Slowly the shooting red lights in my congested eyeballs began to wink out and the agony in my cramped lungs to subside. I gulped once, twice, and then started to fight for air with a weird strangled sound which made my ears ache.
“Take it easy, Adelaide,” said Stephen from somewhere quite near me.
It was still pitch dark in the basement, but the sound of his familiar and solicitous voice broke down my last defences and precipitated the hysterics on the verge of which I had been trembling ever since I realized what had most likely happened to poor Conrad Wilson’s Annie.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” I shrieked, and then again, like a fire siren, “O-oh! O-oh!”
“Steady, Adelaide,” murmured Stephen, close to my shoulder, and put his arm about me. “You’ve been too grand a soldier to blow up when we’re on the spot. Hang on!”
I proceeded to do just that, flinging both arms about his neck and trying desperately to hang onto him and my sanity at the same time. And that was how the inspector found us when, having turned on the light from the switch at the head of the stair, he plunged down the basement steps, a drawn revolver in his hand, mate to the one which the policeman Sweeney was flourishing as he stumbled breathlessly after his superior.
“Tableau!” murmured Stephen Lansing.
The inspector stopped so abruptly, his henchman had to sit
down violently on the steps to keep from stumbling over him. From the landing they stared down at us in the corridor below, now garishly illuminated by the drop light on the stair.
“Aw,” said Sweeney disgustedly, “it’s just them two up to their playful little tricks again.”
The inspector, however, was staring with a shocked expression at the angry dark-red marks on my throat.
“What’s happened to you, Miss Adams?” he asked tremulously.
I had by this time sufficiently recovered myself to release my strangle hold on Stephen’s neck and was attempting to look dignified and at the same time pin back in place the row of false curls which somewhere in the encounter had become detached from my forehead and was draped about my aquiline nose.
“I should think it’s self-evident what happened to me, Inspector,” I said tartly.
Behind me Stephen chuckled. “Hamlet is herself again.”
“The murderer attacked you!” cried the inspector.
“Someone or something certainly attacked me,” I said, wincing as I felt of the sore and aching muscles in my neck.
“Who is he? Did you see him? Where did he go?” The barrage of questions was shot at me by the inspector and Sweeney, both simultaneously and separately.
“I don’t know is the answer to everything, so far as I’m concerned,” I said wearily. “He-it-the light went out suddenly and-and – I don’t even know whether he crept toward me down the stairs or up them from the basement. He was just there, somewhere near me, panting like a wild beast, and then – and then his hands were grinding the life out of me.”
“This here is a two-way switch,” announced Sweeney, who had been poking his flashlight here and there into shadowy corners.
“It can be turned off from the top of the stairs or down here at the foot, whichever switch you happen to be at.”
“And a lot of help that is,” murmured Stephen Lansing sarcastically.
The inspector scowled. “Just where did you come in on this, Lansing?” he inquired.
Perhaps I have neglected to state that since Hilda Anthony’s tragic death that morning the inspector had shed his polite nicety of manner and reverted to a startling brusqueness, reminiscent of the hard-boiled detectives I have so often encountered in mystery novels, the kind who chew savagely on unlighted cigars and glare at the suspects with unmistakable ferocity while snarling unprintable epithets through their discoloured teeth.
“I came in just as you did, Inspector, by the door on the lobby floor,” said Stephen smoothly. “Barely in time, in fact, to aim a flying tackle at Miss Adams’ assailant which, I regret to confess to the lady, knocked her end over end down the staircase.”
I understood then why I felt so alarmingly sore and bruised in a region of my anatomy which until that time I was not aware had been attacked.
“The-er-murderer,” continued Stephen, “took advantage of the mêlée to scuttle away into-into... I have no idea just where he did scuttle away to, Inspector.”
“Oh yeah?” murmured Sweeney.
“Surely if you were on the landing, as you must have been to knock Miss Adams off it, Lansing, your ears told you whether the murderer went upstairs or down.”
Stephen grinned at me. “Miss Adams is a bit on the hefty side, Inspector, begging your pardon, Adelaide. And she does everything thoroughly. I mean, when she falls, it’s rather like the Tower of Pisa coming down. You should have been able to hear the commotion upstairs.”
“I suppose you are cognizant, Lansing, that there is no apparent reason why it couldn’t have been you who first strangled Miss Adams and then pitched her down the stairs?” demanded the inspector.
I caught my breath. After all, I had told Stephen Lansing that I was going to the police with all the information which I possessed and he had as good as warned me that such a move was not healthy.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Inspector Bunyan,” I stammered. “Why should Mr Lansing have tried to kill me one minute and then do all he could the next to save my life?”
“That fall of yours, Miss Adams, was enough to wake the dead,” said the inspector dryly. “After it came off, Stephen Lansing’s only hope was to reverse the act before the police got here and allow himself to be discovered in the role of your rescuer.”
“Granting,” put in Stephen, “that it was I who strangled her in the first place.”
“I’ll say we grant it!” sang out Sweeney lustily. The inspector nodded. “You have never rung quite true to me, Lansing.”
“Isn’t that just too bad?” drawled Stephen.
“There remains the fact that you did call up James Reid from the Sally Ray Beauty Shop the afternoon he was murdered and threaten to knock his block off if he did not stop his infernal snooping.”
Stephen changed colour. “So you know about that,” he said somewhat lamely.
“The more I consider you, the queerer you look to me, Lansing.”
“Do tell!” murmured Stephen sweetly, but it seemed to me a little uneasily.
“Always fully dressed and first on the scene at any hour of the night!” continued the inspector in a tone of unconcealed scorn.
“Bounding up fire escapes like a Leaping Lena!” muttered Sweeney by way of reinforcement.
“Can you give any legitimate excuse for how you came to be in the basement at the moment Miss Adams was attacked?” demanded the inspector sternly.
Stephen grinned. “Incredible as it seems, Inspector, I had a hunch.”
“A hunch!” repeated the inspector, looking outraged.
“That Miss Adams, of whom I happen to be rather fond, was barging straight into a chunk of trouble, and so I made up my mind not to let her out of my sight.”
“You admit you followed her down here,” said the inspector ominously.
“I was just in time to see her coat-tail swish through the basement door when I came out of the lobby, Inspector. My hunch caused me to quicken my steps. I have never fancied basements when there are murderers around. I had no more than closed the door behind myself when the light went out in my face. I must have stood there for a second or two, blinking but otherwise quite motionless.
It was then I heard Miss Adams choking for breath on the landing and took my flying tackle into the unknown.”
“Do you seriously expect me to fall for such twaddle?” protested the inspector.
“Yes,” cried Sweeney belligerently, “do you think I and the inspector are prize jackasses?”
“I wouldn’t say you were exactly prizes,” murmured Stephen with his most provoking grin, though I thought he looked pretty pale about the gills.
“Something has occurred to me, Inspector,” I said, drawing a long breath, “which should settle once for all if it was Stephen Lansing who attacked me.”
“Yes, Miss Adams?” murmured the inspector sceptically.
“I have just remembered that I bit my assailant.”
“Bit him!” cried the inspector in a scandalized voice.
“You would, Adelaide – or the like of that,” said Stephen with a faint chuckle.
“I twisted my head around and fastened my teeth in his arm a little above the wrist,” I went on with a shudder.
“Blow me down!” gasped Sweeney.
“It brought the blood, Inspector, because just before I lost consciousness, I-I tasted it, hot and salty on my lips.”
“Did I say she was a werewolf,” exploded Sweeney, “or did I say she was a werewolf!”
Stephen was rolling up his sleeves to above the elbow. “Not guilty, Inspector!” he cried, his eyes again beginning to dance as he extended two smooth muscular brown arms.
The inspector stared from one to the other of us with an exasperated scowl. “That’s either a remarkably well-thought-up yarn, Miss Adams, for the spur of the moment, or a peculiarly fortuitous set of circumstances for Stephen Lansing,” he said sarcastically.
“However, I don’t imagine without proof you’d expect me – or a jury – to credit it.”<
br />
“I have proof, Inspector,” I replied coolly and pointed to my chin on which there was a slowly drying crimson stain.
“You will have to admit,” I remarked with a sniff, “that while I have been choked and otherwise promiscuously knocked about, the skin on my body is unbroken. Or would you prefer to have a policewoman examine me to make certain?”
The inspector groaned, and Stephen Lansing laughed. “Checkmate!” he said and added flippantly, “No hits, no runs, no errors, Inspector. Your side’s retired.”
The inspector flung up his hands with an exasperated gesture, and Patrolman Sweeney, not bothering to conceal his disgruntled expression, began again to throw his flashlight into the shadowy corners of the basement.
“I don’t see how even a werewolf,” he grumbled, “could bite a man hard enough to make him leak blood all over the place.”
“What!” shouted the inspector. “Give me that flashlight.”
Not from the minute the murderer’s hands closed about my throat until that thin blade of yellow light fell upon the thick scarlet trail, leading from near the foot of the basement stair to the door of the waitresses’ dressing room, did I remember my mission in that evil-looking place.
“The girl!” I gasped. “God forgive me, I forgot her!”
The inspector stared at me as if at last he was sure I had lost my senses, and Sweeney muttering “Bats in the belfry, and how!” put his blunt fingers to his temple and revolved them in an elaborate circle, but Stephen, turning deathly white, seized my arm and began to shake me violently.
“The girl? What girl? For heaven’s sake, say something!” he cried.
I do not quite know how he expected me to speak with my chin waving in the air like a banner, but I finally managed to gasp, “The waitress, Gloria Larue, from the Coffee Shop! She-she came down here to-to change her clothes and-and she hasn’t come up again.”
Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) Page 18
