The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  She poised the inked pen and flashed me a tender look just as she was about to sign. “First time I’ve used it,” she breathed. I looked over her shoulder and watched her trace Mrs. James Cannon along the lined space. The last entry above hers was A. Krumbake, and wife. I noticed it because it was such a funny name.

  The desk clerk had evidently decided by now that we were fairly desirable people. “I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t do more for you,” he said. “It’s just for this one night. By tomorrow morning a lot of them’ll be leaving.”

  I went up with her a second time, to see that she was made as comfortable as she could be under the circumstances. But then there was nothing definitely wrong with the room except its tininess, and the only real hardship was our temporary separation.

  I tipped the boy for bringing up her bag, and then I tipped him a second time for going and digging up a nice, fluffy quilt for her at my request—not to spread over her but to spread on top of the mattress and soften it up a little. Those cots aren’t as comfortable as regular beds by a darned sight. But she was so tired I was hoping she wouldn’t notice the difference.

  Then after he’d thanked me for the double-header he’d gotten out of it, and left the room, I helped her off with her coat and hung it up for her, and even got down on my heels and undid the straps of her little sandals, so she wouldn’t have to bend over and go after them herself. Then we kissed a couple of times and told each other all about it, and I backed out the door.

  The last I saw of her that night she was sitting on the edge of that cot in there, her shoeless feet partly tucked under her. She looked just like a little girl. She raised one hand, wriggled the fingers at me in good night as I reluctantly eased the door closed.

  “Until tomorrow, sweetheart,” she called gently, when there was a crack of opening left.

  “Until tomorrow.”

  The night was as still around us as if it were holding its breath. The latch went cluck, and there we were on opposite sides of it.

  The bellboy had taken the car down with him just now after he’d checked her in, and I had to wait out there a minute or two for him to bring it back up again at my ring. I stepped back to the turn in the hall while waiting, to look at the frosted glass transom over her door; and short as the time was, her light was already out. She must have just shrugged off her dress, fallen back flat, and pulled the coverings up over her.

  Poor kid, I thought, with a commiserating shake of my head. The glass elevator panel flooded with light and I got in the car. The one bellhop doubled for liftman after twelve.

  “I guess she’ll be comfortable,” he said.

  “She was asleep before I left the floor,” I told him.

  The desk man told me where the nearest branch of the Y was, and I took the car with me as the quickest way of getting over there at that hour. I had no trouble at all getting a room, and not a bad one at that for six bits.

  I didn’t phone her before going up, to tell her I’d gotten something for myself, because I knew by the way I’d seen that light go out she was fast asleep already, and it would have been unnecessarily cruel to wake her again.

  I woke up at eight and again I didn’t phone her, to find out how she was, because in the first place I was going right over there myself in a few more minutes, and in the second place I wanted her to get all the sleep she could before I got there.

  I even took my time, showered and shaved, and drove over slowly, to make sure of not getting there any earlier than nine.

  It was a beautiful day, with the sun as brand-new-looking as if it had never shone before; and I even stopped off and bought a gardenia for her to wear on the shoulder of her dress. I thought: I’ll check her out of that depressing dump. We’ll drive to the swellest restaurant in town, and she’ll sit having orange juice and toast while I sit looking at her face.

  I braked in front of the Royal, got out, and went in, lighting up the whole lobby the way I was beaming.

  A different man was at the desk now, on the day shift, but I knew the number of her room so I rode right up without stopping. I got out at the tenth, went down the hall the way we’d been led last night—still green-carpeted but a little less quiet now—and around the turn.

  When I came to the third door down, on the right-hand side—the door that had 1006 on it—I stopped and listened a minute to see if I could tell whether she was up yet or not. If she wasn’t up yet, I was going back downstairs again, hang around in the lobby, and give her another half-hour of badly needed sleep.

  But she was up already. I could hear a sound in there as if she were brushing out her dress or coat with a stiff-bristled brush—skish, skish, skish—so I knocked, easy and loving, on the door with just three knuckles.

  The skish-skish-skish broke off a minute, but then went right on again. But the door hadn’t been tightly closed into the frame at all, and my knocking sent it drifting inward an inch or two. A whiff of turpentine or something like that nearly threw me over, but without stopping to distinguish what it was, I pushed the door the rest of the way in and walked in.

  Then I pulled up short. I saw I had the wrong room.

  There wasn’t anything in it—no furniture, that is. Just bare floorboards, walls and ceiling. Even the light fixture had been taken down, and two black wires stuck out of a hole, like insect feelers, where it had been.

  A man in spotted white overalls and peaked cap was standing on a stepladder slapping a paint brush up and down the walls. Skish-skish-splop!

  I grunted, “Guess I’ve got the wrong number,” and backed out.

  “Guess you must have, bud,” he agreed, equally laconic, without even turning his head to see who I was.

  I looked up at the door from the outside. Number 1006. But that was the number they’d given her, sure it was. I looked in a second time. Long and narrow, like an alcove. Not more than a foot of wall space on either side of the window frame.

  Sure, this was the room, all right. They must have found out they had something better available after all, and changed her after I left last night. I said, “Where’d they put the lady that was in here, you got any idea?”

  Skish-skish-skish. “I dunno, bud, you’ll have to find out at the desk. It was empty when I come here to work at seven.” Skish-skish-splop!

  I went downstairs to the desk again, and I said, “Excuse me. What room have you got Mrs. Cannon in now?”

  He looked up some chart or other they use, behind the scenes, then he came back and said, “We have no Mrs. Cannon here.”

  I pulled my face back. Then I thrust it forward again. “What’s the matter with you?” I said curtly. “I came here with her myself last night. Better take another look.”

  He did. A longer one. Then he came back and said, “I’m sorry, there’s no Mrs. Cannon registered here.”

  I knew there was nothing to get excited about; it would probably be straightened out in a minute or two; but it was a pain in the neck. I was very patient. After all, this was the first morning of my honeymoon. “Your night man was on duty at the time. It was about three this morning. He gave her 1006.”

  He looked that up too. “That’s not in use,” he said. “That’s down for redecorating. It’s been empty for—”

  “I don’t care what it is. I tell you they checked my wife in there at three this morning, I went up with her myself! Will you quit arguing and find out what room she’s in, for me? I don’t want to stand here talking to you all day; I want to be with her.”

  “But I’m telling you, mister, the chart shows no one by that name.”

  “Then look in the register if you don’t believe me. I watched her sign it myself.”

  People were standing around the lobby looking at me now, but I didn’t care.

  “It would be on the chart,” he insisted. “It would have been transferred—” He ran the pad of his finger up the register page from bottom to top. Too fast, I couldn’t help noticing: without a hitch, as if there were nothing to impede it. Then he went b
ack a page and ran it up that, in the same streamlined way.

  “Give it to me,” I said impatiently. “I’ll find it for you in a minute.” I flung it around my way.

  A. Krumbake, and wife stared at me. And then under that just a blank space all the way down to the bottom of the page. No more check-ins.

  I could feel the pores of my face sort of closing up. That was what it felt like, anyway. Maybe it was just the process of getting pale. “She signed right under that name. It’s been rubbed out.”

  “Oh, no, it hasn’t,” he told me firmly. “No one tampers with the register like that. People may leave, but their names stay on it.”

  Dazedly, I traced the ball of my finger back and forth across the white paper under that name, Krumbake. Smooth and unrubbed, its semi-glossy finish unimpaired by erasure. I held the page up toward the light and tried to squint through it, to see whether it showed thinner there, either from rubbing or some other means of eradication. It was all of the same even opacity.

  I spoke in a lower voice now; I wasn’t being impatient anymore. “There’s something wrong. Something wrong about this. I can’t understand it. I saw her write it. I saw her sign it with my own eyes. I’ve known it was the right hotel all along, but even if I wasn’t sure, this other name, this name above, would prove it to me. Krumbake. I remember it from last night. Maybe they changed her without notifying you down here.”

  “That wouldn’t be possible; it’s through me, down here, that all changes are made. It isn’t that I don’t know what room she’s in; it’s that there’s absolutely no record of any such person ever having been at the hotel, so you see you must be mis—”

  “Call the manager for me,” I said hoarsely.

  I stood there waiting by the onyx-topped desk until he came. I stood there very straight, very impassive, not touching the edge of the counter with my hands in any way, about an inch clear of it.

  People were bustling back and forth, casually, normally, cheerily, behind me; plinking their keys down on the onyx; saying, “Any mail for me?”; saying, “I’ll be in the coffee shop if I’m called.” And something was already trying to make me feel a little cut off from them, a little set apart. As if a shadowy finger had drawn a ring around me where I stood, and mystic vapors were already beginning to rise from it, walling me off from my fellow men.

  I wouldn’t let the feeling take hold of me—yet—but it was already there, trying to. I’d give an imperceptible shake of my head every once in a while and say to myself, “Things like this don’t happen in broad daylight. It’s just some kind of misunderstanding; it’ll be cleared up presently.”

  The entrance, the lobby, had seemed so bright when I first came in, but I’d been mistaken. There were shadows lengthening in the far corners that only I could see. The gardenia I had for her was wilting.

  The manager was no help at all. He tried to be, listened attentively, but then the most he could do was have the clerk repeat what he’d already done for me, look on the chart and look in the register. After all, details like that were in the hands of the staff. I simply got the same thing as before, only relayed through him now instead of direct from the desk man. “No, there hasn’t been any Mrs. Cannon here at any time.”

  “Your night man will tell you,” I finally said in despair, “he’ll tell you I brought her here. Get hold of him, ask him. He’ll remember us.”

  “I’ll call him down; he rooms right here in the house,” he said. But then with his hand on the phone he stopped to ask again, “Are you quite sure it was this hotel, Mr. Cannon? He was on duty until six this morning, and I hate to wake him up unless you—”

  “Bring him down,” I said. “This is more important to me than his sleep. It’s got to be cleared up.” I wasn’t frightened yet, out-and-out scared; just baffled, highly worried, and with a peculiar lost feeling.

  He came down inside of five minutes. I knew him right away, the minute he stepped out of the car, in spite of the fact that other passengers had come down with him. I was so sure he’d be able to straighten it out that I took a step toward him without waiting for him to join us. If they noticed that, which was a point in favor of my credibility—my knowing him at sight like that—they gave no sign.

  I said, “You remember me, don’t you? You remember checking my wife into 1006 at three this morning, and telling me I’d have to go elsewhere?”

  “No,” he said with polite regret. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  I could feel my face go white as if a soundless bombshell of flour or talcum had just burst all over it. I put one foot behind me and set the heel down and stayed that way.

  The manager asked him, “Well, did the gentleman stop at the desk perhaps, just to inquire, and then go elsewhere? Do you remember him at all, Stevens?”

  “No, I never saw him until now. It must have been some other hotel.”

  “But look at me; look at my face,” I tried to say. But I guess I didn’t put any voice into it, it was just lip motion, because he didn’t seem to hear.

  The manager shrugged amiably, as if to say, “Well, that’s all there is to it, as far as we’re concerned.”

  I was breathing hard, fighting for self-control. “No. No, you can’t close this matter. I dem—I ask you to give me one more chance to prove that I—that I—Call the night porter, the night bellboy that carried up her bag for her.”

  They were giving one another looks by now, as if I were some sort of crank.

  “Listen, I’m in the full possession of my faculties, I’m not drunk, I wouldn’t come in here like this if I weren’t positive—”

  The manager was going to try to pacify me and ease me out. “But don’t you see you must be mistaken, old man? There’s absolutely no record of it. We’re very strict about those things. If any of my men checked a guest in without entering it on the chart of available rooms, and in the register, I’d fire him on the spot. Was it the Palace? Was it the Commander, maybe? Try to think now, you’ll get it.”

  And with each soothing syllable, he led me a step nearer the entrance.

  I looked up suddenly, saw that the desk had already receded a considerable distance behind us, and balked. “No, don’t do this. This is no way to—Will you get that night-to-morning bellhop? Will you do that one more thing for me?”

  He sighed, as if I were trying his patience sorely. “He’s probably home sleeping. Just a minute; I’ll find out.”

  It turned out he wasn’t. They were so overcrowded and undermanned at the moment that instead of being at home he was sleeping right down in the basement, to save time coming and going. He came up in a couple of minutes, still buttoning the collar of his uniform. I knew him right away. He didn’t look straight at me at first, but at the manager.

  “Do you remember seeing this gentleman come here with a lady, at three this morning? Do you remember carrying her bag up to 1006 for her?”

  Then he did look straight at me—and didn’t seem to know me. “No, sir, Mr. DeGrasse.”

  The shock wasn’t as great as the first time; it couldn’t have been, twice in succession.

  “Don’t you remember that quilt you got for her, to spread over the mattress, and I gave you a second quarter for bringing it? You must remember that—dark blue, with little white flowers all over it—”

  “No, sir, boss.”

  “But I know your face! I remember that scar just over your eyebrow. And—part your lips a little—that gold cap in front that shows every time you grin.”

  “No, sir, not me.”

  My voice was curling up and dying inside my throat. “Then when you took me down alone with you, the last time, you even said, ‘I guess she’ll be comfortable’—” I squeezed his upper arm pleadingly. “Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember?”

  “No, sir.” This time he said it so low you could hardly hear it, as if his training wouldn’t let him contradict me too emphatically, but on the other hand he felt obliged to stick to the facts.

  I grabbed at the hem of my
coat, bunched it up to emphasize the pattern and the color of the material. “Don’t you know me by this?” Then I let my fingers trail helplessly down the line of my jaw. “Don’t you know my face?”

  He didn’t answer anymore, just shook his head each time.

  “What’re you doing this for? What’re you trying to do to me? All of you?” The invisible fumes from that necromancer’s ring, that seemed to cut me off from all the world, came swirling up thicker and thicker about me. My voice was strident with a strange new kind of fear, a fear I hadn’t known since I was ten.

  “You’ve got me rocky now! You’ve got me down! Cut it out, I say!”

  They were starting to draw back little by little away from me, prudently widen the tight knot they had formed around me. I turned from one to the other, from bellhop to night clerk, night clerk to day clerk, day clerk to manager, and each one as I turned to him retreated slightly.

  There was a pause, while I fought against this other, lesser kind of death that was creeping over me—this death called strangeness, this snapping of all the customary little threads of cause and effect that are our moorings at other times. Slowly they all drew back from me step by step, until I was left there alone, cut off.

  Then the tension exploded. My voice blasted the quiet of the lobby. “I want my wife!” I yelled shatteringly. “Tell me what’s become of her. What’ve you done with her? I came in here with her last night; you can’t tell me I didn’t.…”

  They circled, maneuvered around me. I heard the manager say in a hurried undertone, “I knew this was going to happen. I could have told you he was going to end up like this. George! Archer! Get him out of here fast!”

  My arms were suddenly seized from behind and held. I threshed against the constriction, so violently both my legs flung up clear of the floor at one time, dropped back again, but I couldn’t break it. There must have been two of them behind me.

  The manager had come in close again, now that I was safely pinioned, no doubt hoping that his nearness would succeed in soft-pedaling the disturbance. “Now will you leave here quietly, or do you want us to call the police and turn you over to them?”