Dead of Night

by Stewart Sterling

  Stewart Sterling

  Dead of Night

  Chapter One: GIRL WITH EYE PATCH

  ON PERCENTAGE, I should have figured that pillow slip would turn out to be the fuse to a case full of dynamite. Nine times out of ten the real trouble in any hotel breaks just before the security chief is supposed to go off duty. This call came through at five to eight. I was practically on my way over to the Garden to catch the bantamweight prelims. I should have known.

  But it had been a quiet night. Nothing more exciting than putting the grip on a pair of wallet workers who’d been smiting the pre-theater crowd hip and thigh until we placed them under genteel restraint. So when Zingy flagged me, I took for granted it would be merely too much alcohilarity on the sixth where a bunch of tycoons were tuning up for a banquet. Matter requiring tact but not much time, probably.

  From across the lobby at the bell desk, Zingy—our jockey-sized bell captain on the night side—gave me the P sign, thumb and index fingers circled against the other outstretched forefinger, and followed it with a sweeping gesture of the palm horizontal like an umpire calling a man safe on base. One of the staff wanted me. That shouldn’t hold me up long, I figured.

  Walking to the house phones, I kept my eyes on the couple who’d attracted my attention just before Zingy began his deaf-mute signals. Sandy-haired man about thirty-five; solidly put together; stocky but not fleshy; short, wide face with prominent cheekbones, broad nostrils and a thin, prissy mouth; he looked like the sort of gent who’d call every bellman Mac and every porter George.

  His tux was a mite too large for him. I’d never have given it another thought if he’d been too big for his coat. Lots of bulgy burghers outgrow their tailor-mades.

  But though this lad was already big, he’d need four more inches around the short ribs before he caught up with that jacket. Trifling thing? Sure. But a rented tux, paraded alongside the sleek custom jobs ordinarily circulating around our plushery, stands out like a beard on a room clerk.

  Nothing wrong about hiring a pair of satin lapels, to be sure. Only—the kind of customers who can afford our Plaza Royale prices usually don’t have to rent dinner clothes. Then too, this joe matched up with his companion about like melted margarine with some of Sandor’s champignons. She was a thing.

  Maybe it was the way that tall, silver comb set off her black hair in regular tourist-ad señorita style. Or the lacy, black shawl-thing over her otherwise bare shoulders and white dinner gown. Anyhow the effect was Spanish enough to make me think of clicking castanets and the thrum of guitars and high heels stamping out the final bars of a samba. What I could see of her face helped the idea along; she was young and pretty in spite of the white patch covering her right eye.

  Perhaps that disfiguring patch accounted for her being so gidgety. She kept glancing around nervously, twisting her head this way and that, clutching her escort’s arm as if she was afraid he’d get away from her. Which he might have been trying to do, from what I could see of his actions.

  There’d only been the two of them in the elevator when it let them out at the lobby level. Prissy-mouth had stalked out ahead of her, then turned as if suddenly remembering his manners and made a grab for her. She shook his hand off irritably, spoke crossly to him, and tucked her hand inside his arm, as they came toward the Fifth Avenue entrance. All the way across the lobby, he’d kept half a stride ahead, practically dragging her behind him. Queer pair.

  It’s no part of the security office’s job to oversee who twos around with who. But something about this guy made me think of various unpleasantries a few of our femme guests had experienced after hiring an escort from one of the bureaus that make a business of that sort of thing. I made a mental note to check up on the elegant eyeful, and picked up the phone to ask if somebody wanted Mister Vine.

  “Mrs. Munster does, Mister V.” The switchboard gal connected me with the head housekeeper.

  “Want me, Ada?”

  “I’ve got a pillow slip, Mister Vine. I wish you’d come up and look at it.” Ada Munster sounded fretful and worried, but then anybody who has to supervise two hundred floor maids is likely to sound that way.

  “In the morning, okay?” I wouldn’t miss more than one of the preliminary bouts, if I could get going right away.

  “I do think you’d better see it tonight. It’s got oil on it.”

  That didn’t sound good. Ada wouldn’t have called about hair oil.

  “And there’s—something else.” She didn’t want to talk with the switchboard girl listening. They always do on security calls. By request.

  “What room, Ada?”

  “Suite Twenty-One Em Em, Mister V. But I’m in my office.”

  “I’ll be up.” I kissed the bantam bouts good-by, wondered if I’d make it in time for the middleweights.

  When I went around behind the main desk to go back into the board room, Reidy Duman, our silky-suave assistant manager, asked if I hadn’t planned to go to the fights.

  I said I’d be going directly. Meanwhile, what did he know about deluxe duplex 21MM?

  He came around back of the registration board with me, looked over my shoulder at the card I took out of the rack.

  It said that Teresa Marino (Miss) and maid, from Dallas, Texas, had checked in Monday, July ninth, at a daily rate of $75.00. Evidently a gal who could afford her morning corn flakes at a dime a flake, if she so wished. There were a couple of significant notations. Beside Length of Stay was typed 3-4 w. Under Credit was the Est. which meant our cashier’s department had established her financial standing to its satisfaction. Under Previous Guest History was a cryptic ?. Meaning that there weren’t any records of her preference in hard or soft pillows, things like that.

  “Oh, oh! That one!” Reidy touched finger tips to lips, blew a kiss to the filing-cabinets. “Something spesh. Here for eye treatment. Wears a patch—”

  I said I’d seen her. And wondered why I hadn’t noticed her around the lobby or the dining-room or the elevators in the five days she’d been here. “Like to look at her bill, Reidy.”

  He got it from the 20-2400 cashier. It didn’t tell much except that in the hundred-odd hours since checking in, Miss T. Marino and maid had spent a nice snug total of $311.40 for Restaurant and Bar. Also that she had quite a flock of clothes and wasn’t backward about sending them to the cleaners in large batches.

  Further, that she had a loose hand with a telephone, both local and L.D. There were quite a lot of the long-line charges. None of them were to Dallas. Or any place in Texas. There were six to Lexington, Kentucky. One for each day. One extra for Saturday.

  Reidy cocked a canny eye at me. “Something?”

  “Thing that killed the cat, that’s all. Saw her few minutes ago with a lad who didn’t seem in her handicap division. Always thinking of the guests’ welfare. See framed motto.”

  He wasn’t fooled. “Want me to put her on the Watch List?”

  “I’ll do it if it’s necessary.” Reidy’s a right boy, but like all assistant managers, suffers from the illusion he can boss the security office around. “You skin your own snakes.”

  “Hope you lose every bet at the Garden.” He grinned.

  I went out to see Pete Zingara.

  “Miss Marino? Zounds and gadzooks!” Zingy did a soft-shoe break beside the bell desk. “Halfies all the time. Never less than halfies. Sometimes she gives with the buck, on drugstore errands. For headache powders, stuff from the prescription, like that.”

  “Order much of that, does she?” Only customer I hate more’n a glass-smashing drunk is one of those sleeping-pill beauties. If she was one.

  “Nah, not so much.” He saw I was serious. “She’s swell folks. Owns a flock of oil wells or something. But nice and quiet, I mean. Real frie
ndly. And that maid of hers—whoo-deedoo!”

  “Ever notice one particular friend of hers?” I described the joe in the oversized tux.

  “I know ’m.” He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger; Zingy’s quite a buster with that sign language; maybe he has Indian blood in him. “I hear he’s been hangin’ around heavy, I saw him there one mornin’ when I was double-dutying, and even then he was dipping into the clear broth of bourbon, but not in his pocket. Lets her put out with all the cash. But,” he held up a palm, traffic-cop style, “I never hear he’s making like love in bloom. You ask me, Mister V.—”

  “I’m asking.”

  “He’s not her joy friend; he’s strictly for biz. I wouldn’t know what the deal is, but—”

  “But from here in, you’ll keep your ears fanned out. Swell. Do so.” I went upstairs to the head housekeeper’s office.

  Ada Munster’s a sad-faced, stringy-haired, skinny old gal with an eighteen-carat heart and a full quota of savvy about human nature. She’d have to have the savvy, after being in charge of twelve hundred bedrooms for three hundred and sixty-five nights a year, ten years. Be surprised some of the peculiar things you learn about people, making up bedrooms.

  “I didn’t want to bother you.” She hauled a pillow slip out of a paper laundry bag on a chair beside her desk. “It’s not enough, we have to salvage linens after all the lipstick smears and even tallow,” she pointed to a turquoise nylon spread with little dime-sized discs of wax on it, “but oil!”

  I smelled. Light machine oil. “You said there was something else?”

  She turned the slip over, pointed to fine, sandy hair-clippings about an eighth of an inch long, embedded in the percale. “She has black hair, Mister Vine. Her maid has black, too.”

  “Thanks, Ada.” There’s no law against sleeping with a revolver under your pillow, though it puts a guest on the Watch List and keeps him there. But we do have rules about unregistered males in the beds of female guests. Those hairs were from a freshly barbered he. Miss Marino’s sandy-haired escort, down in the lobby, had been well-groomed. “I’ll check on it, Ada. Anything else?”

  “Well—” she looked unhappy, “we don’t wish to complain about guests who can afford that kind of suite. But the maids say they never can get in either of the bedrooms until late in the afternoon, sometimes, as tonight, not before four-thirty. That makes it hard for us, with so many rooms to rack up, and really it is quite unusual for a lady to want to be in her suite all day with the beds unmade! Don’t you think?”

  I did think. “Where’s the maid who had sense enough to spot that gun stain?”

  “Elsie Dowd? Mrs. Dowd’s still up on the twenty-first. I can call her—”

  “Never mind. I’ll go up. Tell her she rates an extra day’s vacation pay. Thanks a lot, Ada.”

  Elsie was checking off soap and tissue on her stock list beside the 2100 linen closet.

  “I hope I didn’t make any trouble for Miss Marino, Mister Vine.” Elsie was fiftyish and sallow-eyed; she was a little frightened. “She’s been real nice to me, personally.”

  “Tips you? All that?”

  “Oh, most of them do. But Miss Marino makes you feel she’s interested in you. She’s so sweet. But it’s these men—”

  “Plural?”

  “Understand, I’m not suggesting anything wrong.” She was uneasy. “But there are generally a couple of men around. There’s one in her suite right now—”

  “Probably her cousins.” I gave her a reassuring shoulder pat. “Think no more about it.”

  I thought about it. No hotel likes a male patron who invites women up to his suite, particularly in the evening. But any good house would rather have a dozen like such than one woman who attracts men to her suite. That’s bad. For business, I mean.

  I knocked at the 21MM living-room door.

  No answer.

  I rattled keys.

  A gruff bass voice: “Who you want?”

  “This the house officer.”

  “Miss Marino’s not here.”

  “Open the door.”

  “Hell I will.” He sounded tough.

  “You’re not registered in this suite.” I raised my voice so Elsie would hear me and come along the corridor. “Open up, or I will.”

  “Try it!” he growled. “You’ll damn well wish you hadn’t.”

  In my book there’s only one thing to do in a case like that.

  So I did it.

  Chapter Two: STREAK OF BLOOD

  ORDINARILY, I’d never have walked in on him, cold like that. Not after a warning. Especially not after learning some party’d been snoozing with a persuader under his pillow!

  Thing would have been for me to stay out there in the corridor, watch all three of the suite’s doors, and send Elsie to phone for Duman. Then we’d have had two witnesses to any action which might lead to a suit against the hotel.

  But this seemed to be an emergency. The guest was out. Somebody else was in her suite. If the guy was there with her permission, still I’d be entitled to look into this free-wheeling pretty who entertained her men friends in our bedrooms.

  So I used my master key, gave the door a push, stepped back fast enough to make it tough for him to get a snap shot at me, but not so sudden he couldn’t see me.

  Fifteen steps farther along was the door to the suite’s east bedroom. I got to it, quick and quiet. While I was unlocking it, I called to Elsie, loud enough to cover the click of the latch, “Phone Mister Duman, ask him to hustle up.”

  I went in, catfoot. The twins were made up. The spreads weren’t mussed. No men’s clothes around. No male brushes or such on the bureau. Only a trace of parfum de panatella. From a tencent cigar, if I’m any judge.

  The door to the long living-room was half open. Through it I could see the back of a white linen suit. The man was close to the door of the bedroom on my side. I was only ten feet away when I saw him. His left elbow leaned on the bulgy-eyed television set all those double-letter suites are equipped with. Shielded by the cabinet, his right hand hung down so the automatic he held would be hidden from anyone coming in from the corridor to the living-room.

  All I could see was that narrow-shouldered but nicely tailored back, the thick and well-tanned neck. And the gun.

  He was concentrating on that door so it was no trick to come up behind, grab his wrist before he heard me.

  He didn’t battle. Just used one explosive obscenity, then kept still, vocally and otherwise.

  While I was prying the gun out of his paw I started to make a crack about house rules forbidding the brandishing of weapons. But when he twisted around so I got a look at his face—I didn’t bother to finish. I was more astonished than he’d been.

  He didn’t recognize me; least he didn’t know who I was; he might have noticed me around the lobby. But the tenseness didn’t go out of those smooth, freshly barbered college-boy features which contrasted so handsomely with the curly white hair. That hair was by way of being his trade-mark, so thick and tight it might have been a wig carved out of marble. It really did have the polished look of marble.

  I’d have known him, of course, even if he hadn’t been a spectacularly splurgish patron of the Plaza Royale. Even with his ten-dollar cravat a bit on the bias and his brown-agate eyes squinting with alarm, he could have marched smack off the front cover of that weekly which had run his portrait in color, week or so ago. All he needed was that background the mag had used as a frame for his picture—the horn of plenty spewing out a cornucopian flood of slick convertibles, summer cottages, shiny refrigerators, outboard motors, movie projectors, washing machines, all showered round with coins of the realm. Yair, sure. Dow Lanerd.

  I laid the automatic on the coffee table beside a silver bowl with yellow lilies floating on water. “Maid reported a man in this suite, Mister Lanerd.” I knew the sandy hair-clippings hadn’t come from his cranium. He wouldn’t have been smoking cheap stogies in this social-register atmosphere.

  “
Naturally I’m here by invitation.” He kept his face toward the corridor door. “What right have you to force your way in here, Mister—”

  “Vine. Gilbert Vine. All the right in the world. If we learned that some unauthorized individual was prowling your suite, you’d expect us to investigate. Why object to letting a house officer in here?”

  “Didn’t believe you were—an officer.” He sauntered to the coffee table, waited a second to find out if I’d say, ‘Mustn’t touch!’ When I didn’t, he picked up the automatic, slid it in his pocket, kept his hand there. But he wasn’t watching me; whatever danger he anticipated would evidently come from the corridor.

  “Realize you have a job to do, Vine. Only I’m not exactly unauthorized. I’m registered here. My rooms happen to be just across the corridor—and since I had business to discuss with Miss Marino, I came across for a chat. Then she had to leave, asked me to wait until she returned.”

  I let him see I didn’t buy it. “Didn’t look to me as if you were waiting for a lady.”

  He gave out with one of the famed Lanerd boyish grins—a small-boy grin, partly sheepish, partly mischievous. Hard to dislike a man with a grin like that. “What’d be your reaction, if you’d been in a pretty girl’s apartment, suddenly a gruff voice demanded immediate entrance?”

  “Worried about her husband?” I knew it hadn’t been that. If he’d feared what the tabs call a Jealous Mate, he’d have done what any other man would do—scramoose through one of the bedrooms, out to the corridor.

  “She’s not married.” He approached the door, hesitated, peered down the corridor toward the elevators, twisted around to look in the opposite direction, came back in, shut the door. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if she had some close friend. Be easy to misconstrue the reason for my being here.”

  “It certainly would have. When’ll Miss Marino be back?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “No?” That burned me. For him to think I could be dumb enough to believe she’d ask this hundred-thousand-a-year biggie to hang around her hotel room until her indefinite return. Or that he’d remain, on any such vague basis. “Where’d she go?”