Dead of Night

by Stewart Sterling

  “Oh!” Edie screamed; the double Martini Ed so clumsily upset slopped across the bar into her lap.

  I made a grab for the glass, bumping into her.

  She lurched off her stool. The handbag bounced on the floor beside the bar.

  I was after it before it hit. Somehow or other it busted open. Stuff all over hell and gone. Purse, mirror, compact, lipstick, pencil, loose coins, keys. And gloves.

  The square brass tag had stamped in it: 21MM.

  I got that key, first.

  Chapter Eleven: KEY TO MURDER SUITE

  THE GLOVES HAD PLOPPED into a puddle of mixed gin and vermouth; they sopped up the liquor so it was impossible to tell if the finger tips had been stained or not. Before I could get my hands on any other loose items from her purse, the Eberlein babe was on me. Raking my face with her claws.

  “You did that on purpose!”

  There are boites where noisy altercations are no handicap; our Steeplechase isn’t one of them.

  “Mickey.” I gave him the high sign, maneuvered Walch between me and the fingernails. “Ask Miss Lane to step here.”

  He slid out from behind the bar.

  I’d counted on La Eberlein’s being more interested in retrieving her possessions than in punishing me. She was. She and Walch scooped up money, gloves, compact, combs, pencils.

  Walch muttered to her, “Don’t start anything, now!” He had a thin, strongly corded neck, the back of it mottled with red as he bent over.

  She swore beneath her breath. “This guy’s no errand boy.” By then everyone in the place was watching us, listening. “He’s a—lousy house dick!”

  Walch tossed the last of the purse’s scattered contents on the bar. “You take him for a Good Humor man?” He scowled at me. “Run along and lurk behind a potted palm, bud.”

  “Hey!” Edie Eberlein protested. “He didn’t return everything I dropped.” She scrabbled things into her handbag.

  Fran Lane came in quietly, headed over. Fran hasn’t grown bigger’n a minute in her thirty years, but she has more nerve than most tiger tamers. We don’t have enough protection work—that is, work a woman can handle—to keep her busy, so she doubles on the information desk, night side.

  “Fran,” I indicated the mess the Martini had made, “lady’s dress, accidentally splashed. Will you go with her to the ladies’ lounge, see what you can do?”

  “Why, certainly, Mister Vine.” Fran took Edie’s arm.

  La Eberlein shook her off angrily. “Take care of myself, thank you. And I’ll send you the bill, stupid.” She glared at me.

  Walch growled, “Ah, have another drink. Let it go.”

  Mickey edged in behind Fran, waiting.

  Fran cooed, “Why, that’s a shame. If you don’t sponge that off right away, you’ll ruin that lovely dress. Come on, honey.” She pushed Edie ahead of her so it looked as if she was tagging along behind instead of doing the propelling. Mickey, with great show of being solicitous, fell in on the other flank. Between them, she had to move.

  Miss Eberlein didn’t want to go, but she wanted a public fuss even less. “Don’t go ’way, Keithy boy. Be right back.”

  He grunted something uncomplimentary, climbed back on his stool. I thought he might decide to follow me out, when he saw me trailing after Edie and her escorts. But he stayed put.

  Fran didn’t steer her for Ladies, of course; she herded Edie into the small cubicle just outside our credit office, a room just big enough for a desk and a couple of chairs.

  “I’ll get a damp cloth, honey,” Fran offered that as an opening gambit to find out if I wanted her to stay or leave.

  Edie settled it. “You know what you can do with your damp cloth!” She flashed one indignant glance around her. “Haven’t you caused me trouble enough?” She began to raise her voice. “Give me the things you spilled out of my bag, this instant, or I’ll give you some publicity the Plaza Royale won’t forget in a hurry!”

  Fran heeled the door shut.

  I held out the 21MM key. “This was in your bag, Miss Eberlein, but it’s hotel property. Only lent to patrons temporarily. Are you registered here?”

  “You know damn well I’m not,” she blazed. “That key was given to me by the person who rents the suite. You give it back, now!”

  That stopped me. She did know Tildy Millett’s manager, might know the skater. If the key’d come into Edie’s possession legitimately, it might have no connection with the dead man up on the twenty-first. But there was that locked closet, plus the possibility the key might have been the one taken from Roffis. The key seemed to be the meat of the matter.

  “We have to have a strict rule about keys,” I said. “The only time we allow them to be used by any other than the registered patron is when a Key Permission card is signed and left at the main desk. If such a card is on file, of course—” I jingled the tag. “Fran, will you check on that?”

  “Right away.” Fran went out, left the door open.

  Edie seemed flustered. “I don’t know—about any card.”

  I followed it up. “The hotel is anxious for its patrons to have a good time while here. But we’re only concerned about our guests, naturally. The anxiety doesn’t extend to paid entertainers, f’rexamp.”

  “No law says you can’t invite friends to your suite.” She was ready to go to bat for her racket, so ready that I couldn’t imagine her having been involved in a stabbing. She’d have been more interested in getting away from there.

  Zingy, halfway across the lobby, caught sight of me, made vigorous pantomime of the letter T.

  I nodded that I got it; Tim wanted me.

  But Zingy hurried over, making a spinning motion with his right forefinger—the hustle sign.

  I went to the door. “Excuse me one second, Miss Eberlein.” I caught hold of the jamb with my left hand, about head-high.

  “Trouble a-bubbling,” the bell captain said softly.

  “Always is, my night off. What now?”

  “Tim, up in the Crystal Room. He’s looking for somebody, says you know who.”

  “And?”

  “He hollers the law’s up there hunting for the same gent, so will you kindly hop up quick-like?”

  A little twist-of-the-wrist-ing and the face of my Longines was a reasonable facsimile of a mirror; good enough so I could see a big maroon hat receding toward the inner door going through to the credit office.

  “Better, I guess. Find Mister Duman, tell him I’m going up to the sixth.” I moved toward the main desk, so if they shunted her away in Credit, she’d still have a chance to scamper out through the door where I’d been standing.

  Zingy went. Fran Lane came back. “You didn’t think there was any Key Permission, did you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Isn’t even any permittee.”

  She peered. The little office was empty.

  “Too bad.” I smiled. “She must have slid out through the credit office.”

  Fran nodded solemnly. “You want me to look for her, but not too hard.”

  “Not unless she has some of her wares with her.”

  “Flesh peddler?”

  “Yair. You had her right, didn’t you? She had all the earmarks.”

  She laughed. “Some of those convention cut-ups, off the legal leash?”

  “You’d make some man very happy,” I told her, “if you didn’t know so much about sex.”

  The service elevator zipped me up to the sixth. The Crystal Room was thick with smoke, loud with chatter and clatter.

  Our caravanserai is too high-priced to cater to run-of-the-mine conventions. But we take a few where the foregatherers are not the type who go for snake-dancing in the lobby. Doctors, scientists, economists, upper-bracketeers, mostly. The bunch in the Crystal Room were pollsters, the boys who guess ’em wrong at election time. Public pulse-feelers. That’s what the publicity stated.

  Possibly a hundred left in the room. Most of them clustering at tables or huddling in groups. At the far end, a tall, h
igh-domed individual up at the speakers’ table was urging those present to “get behind this thing solidly—back it with your utmost energy and enthusiasm—” I didn’t listen.

  Armand was in charge. Emile hovered around the door to the banquet kitchen to see everything went smooth and serene. There were about thirty mess-jacketed waiters pouring demitasses, passing coronas, collecting spumone saucers, so on. I didn’t see Auguste.

  Tim wasn’t visible. But Hacklin was. Giving Armand that elbow grip. Our dapper-dan banquet maître didn’t care for any part of it. I could interpret his Gallic gestures clear across the Crystal Room.

  I went over.

  Armand caught sight of me. “Meestair Vine, s’il vous plait!”

  Hacklin let go the maître’s arm. “C’mon, Smart Stuff. Where’s this Auguste fellow, hah? We’re not kidding.”

  “I know you’re not.” I wondered if he’d run into Auguste in 21MM. Likely he wouldn’t have, if he didn’t stay after noon and didn’t come on before midnight; Auguste only worked the noon to eight o’clock shift, ordinarily. “We’re trying to locate him.”

  “Yeah? Downstairs they told me he’d quit and gone home. Then I hear he’s doin’ extra duty tonight.”

  “Sometimes Armand lets them do that,” I explained, “to earn an extra buck.”

  Armand gesticulated. “Was ici. Is gone.”

  “Don’t worry about it, maître.” I asked Hacklin, “What’s the big sweat?”

  “See this?” He thrust a paper at me. A newspaper clipping headed Numerology. Under it was:

  Following are the most significant numbers of the past thirty days. The figures in the third column indicate the number of times a certain number, played straight, has appeared since January, 1950. The figures in the last column indicate the number of times other combinations of the same number repeated.

  Below it were figures:

  and a lot more.

  “So?” I knew it was one of those daily tab features for the suckers who throw their corn away on the numbers game.

  “So we found it in Auguste’s locker!” Hacklin stuck his face close to mine.

  I said I didn’t suppose more than three or four hundred thousand other guys would have clipped the same column.

  “All right, Smart Stuff. We know the guy we’re after is mixed up in the policy angle. And there’s one other little thing that may interest you. This Auguste changed his black waiter coat to the monkey coats these fellows wear.” He jerked a thumb at the Plaza Royale’s gorgeous gold-braided mess jackets, only used to put on the dog at exclusive banquets.

  “You found something in his other coat?” I didn’t like the ugly look in Hacklin’s eye.

  “On it! On the sleeve. Sticky goo. I scraped off some with my knife. Blood. Yeah. What d’ya know about that!”

  Across the hall I saw Auguste. He was coming toward us, straight toward Hacklin.

  Chapter Twelve: DOORWAY TO DEATH

  IN THE KILLERCYCLE DRAYMAS, the criminal is just a stupid-though-crafty rat who eventually gets caught by the steel-trap mind of the detective. Nobody but the snoopersleuth is permitted to have a mind like a steel trap. Everybody else wanders around in a daze suspecting obviously innocent parties, until snap goes the trap of the mastermind. I wish I could operate like that sometime.

  However, most of the criminals security men deal with are slick articles. Key workers, who hang around the information desk until they spot a guest’s name and room number, wait for him to go out, then step up, ask for his key, and go up and rifle his room; corridor cats who prowl along until they see an open door with a maid racking up, then boldly walk in and make like they’re the guests; crooks like that aren’t so stupid.

  In the case of 21MM, anyone who could get into a guarded suite, murder the guard, and get away without being seen or heard, was a cool and calculating head. Auguste didn’t fit the picture.

  Neither did it seem reasonable that a waiter who had the nerve to go up against a cleaver-equipped chef would be the sort to stab any man in the back. And even if Auguste had gone berserk, he’d never have returned to the scene of his crime and blandly admitted he was looking for the weapon he’d misplaced.

  But if Hacklin waltzed him downtown to one of those high-pressure tête-à-têtes, by the time it was discovered the stains were only steak gravy, it’d be too late to repair the bad publicity. So I aimed at sidetracking Hacklin long enough to switch Auguste downstairs, get the truth out of him without scaring him out of his wits.

  He hurried across the Crystal Room, straight for us. Armand tugged at my sleeve, trying to get my attention.

  “Meestair Vine, Auguste—”

  “Don’t melt your mustache, Armand.” By the speakers’ table, at the far end of the raised platform, I saw a blond crew cut and a white tie with Roy Yaker’s genial puss sandwiched in between. He was being buttonholed by an individual who had his back to me; the other man wasn’t wearing tails or tux. All I could make out clearly at that distance was the sparkle of a ring on his right flipper. It shone like a star sapphire.

  I rattled the key I’d taken from Edie, lowered my voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Hacklin, here’s something more to the point than any waiter’s sleeve.” I half turned as if to keep Armand from overhearing; all I was after was to make Hacklin twist around, away from the oncoming Auguste.

  “Where’d you get that?” Hacklin reached for it.

  “Took it away from a sizzle sister down in the Steeplechase Bar just now.” I let him have the key. “A Miss Edie Eberlein. Claimed the key was given to her by Tildy Millett.”

  “Yuh? You hold her?” The D.A.’s man was interested, all right.

  Auguste bustled up. “Mister Fine, I am told—”

  I waved him away. “See I’m busy, Fessler? Ask Tim Piazolle about it!”

  “But Mister Fine, Mister Piazolle, he—”

  “I’ll talk to you down in my office, Fessler.” I ignored him, turned back to Hacklin, who was observing Auguste suspiciously. “I didn’t have any charge against this zizzer, so I couldn’t hold her. But she was with Tildy Millett’s manager, gent name of Keith Walch. Thought you might want to question him.” Auguste raised his eyebrows and his shoulders, drooped the corners of his mouth, gazed at Armand, turned on his heel, walked away with his arms bent at the elbows, palms upturned.

  “Walch, huh.” Hacklin decided he had no call to inquire into my business with any waiter named Fessler. “Where’s he?”

  “Over there.” I pointed. “Talking to the big bucko in the soup and fish. Big lad’s name is Yaker. He’s running this kaffee klatch. Lanerd was to speak at the dinner.” If Hacklin inferred that I’d trailed Walch up to the Crystal Room, why should I have set him straight?

  “Walch might know where his skater is.” Hacklin was mollified. “But put the clamps on that waiter, hear? We sent the coat down to Broome Street for tests. If it turns out the same type blood as Herb’s, I want five minutes with that son of a bitch before I turn him in downtown.” He stalked toward Yaker and Walch.

  Armand puffed out his cheeks, blew out his breath with a soft hissing.

  “Armand,” I said. “You are dumb.”

  “M’sieu?” He patted his toupee, agitated.

  “Deaf. Dumb. Blind. You know nothing about nothing.” I knuckled him gently in the short ribs. “N’est-ce pas?”

  “Ah-ho!” His eyes became very round. “That is how it is, that way?”

  “Just like that.” I went out to the check-off room, through the serving-pantry, into the banquet kitchen where the smell of quail Montmorency and sweetbreads Emile made me realize it was about the time I’d have been eating a frankfurter, if I’d gone to the Garden.

  Tim wasn’t around. Neither was Auguste.

  When the service car dropped me at the third and I went into my office, they were both there.

  Tim had to explain why he’d missed Auguste up in the banquet kitchen. Auguste insisted on relating how he had learned “Mister Fine” was lo
oking for him, how he’d hastened to locate me soon’s he knew I wanted him.

  I told Tim what I wanted him to do about the maids, bellmen, porters, electricians, waiters, and valets who might have been on the twenty-first within the last four hours. Then I took Auguste into my private cubby.

  Boiled down, what he said was that he’d served early dinner for Miss Millett, guest, and maid. Around six, that was. Vichysoisse, sole bonne femme, bifteck bearnaise, salade avocado, pêche Melba, café. He was especially careful with the order; Miss “Marino” took care of him excellently in the matter of lagniappe.

  The guest had been Roffis. With the guard there had been not exactly trouble, but an argument only. “What was the matter, Auguste?”

  “The filet, it was the finest, well aged and exzellently charcoaled, but this boozhwah claimed it was tough, sztringy. I do not tell him he is probably not uszed to such tender cuts, but this I think to myzelf. Iz not the firszt time we disagree about the meals, Mister Fine.”

  “Any other arguments at the table?”

  “Szome talk about a fisit from Mister Lanerd’s wife—diszagreeableness, pozzibly. Nikky, the maid, she was angry about it. Miss Marino did not szeem so angry, thoughtful only. Roffis, he did not expressz opinion.” About seven, they finished. Auguste began to take tables away. After the meal, Miss Marino had gone into her bedroom with Nikky. Roffis took his time about finishing his dessert, razzed Auguste some more, went into his room.

  As Auguste was clearing away, Miss Marino had come back to the living-room. Then the maid had returned, too. Both appeared to be upset. While Auguste was busy rolling the hot-table out into the hall, Roffis had re-entered the living-room. He exchanged a few words in an undertone with Miss Marino, hurried into the girl’s bedroom. This was something Auguste had not seen him do before, on any of the occasions when the waiter’d been in the suite.

  When Auguste got out to the corridor, began stacking dishes on the tables, he noticed the door to Miss Marino’s bedroom was slightly open. He paid no particular attention to this. But a minute later, after he’d made another trip to the living-room and back to the corridor, a man rushed out of the bedroom, bumping into him, nearly upsetting the hot-table.