Dead of Night

by Stewart Sterling

  When the gnome-faced Hibernian in a candy-striped shirt brought me my rum sour, I asked him where it was the shooting had taken place. He leaned over the bar to point out a phone booth down by the washrooms.

  “Second booth, where the new glass is in.” He would have been pleased to give gory details. “Johnny’d been right here at th’ bar, no more’n a cork pop from where you’re standin’ now. Tommy, there, just give him a ryeball on th’ house,” like an impresario he waved at a lanky barman with handlebar mustaches, evidently a celebrity since the assassination.

  I would have asked whether Miss Eberlein had been present at the time of the gunplay, but something told me my inquiry would not have been courteously received. I drifted toward the phone booth. Halfway there, I spotted Edie. She wore black, with a rope of pearls big enough for an elephant’s collar. She was at a table with a brassy babe in a vermilion getup with a neckline that plunged way down to there, obviously not the kind of damsel discussed in polite circles of Burlington, Vermont.

  They were ten tables away. Intervening quaffing and laffing made it impossible to hear what Edie was saying. But there were three Tom Collins glasses on their table.

  I headed for a door demurely labeled: Used Beer Department, bumped into Yaker coming out.

  He’d cut himself shaving. He smelled like a bar sink. The fawn gabardine he’d borrowed from Walch fitted him like a Cub Scout uniform. He boggled at me, glassy-eyed, trying to place me. I went in the men’s room, gave him a minute to wend his way between the cram-jammed tables, went out again.

  He was dunking his nose in the Collins, listening to a tongue-lashing from Edie, when I pulled up a spare chair. I thought La Eberlein was going to keel over with apoplexy. She was practically speechless, but the few choice epithets she did sputter out were really pier-six stuff.

  I didn’t fool around. “That key, Miss E. One I got out of your bag.”

  “You got a nerve like a ulcerated tooth. Comin’ to my table without bein’—”

  “Remember? You said the guest gave the key to you. I asked the guest. She said she never gave it to you.”

  Plunging Neckline was dumfounded and scared; she wanted out. Yaker pawed soddenly at liquor dribbling off his chin. Edie cursed me till she ran short of breath. She clenched her glass as if to hurl the drink in my face. I did what I could to appear calm and unflustered. My insides were doing nip-ups; Edie’s loud scrawking was attracting the attention of several meaneyed waiters.

  “Where’d you get that 21MM key, Edie?”

  “You can’t crash my party an’ browbeat me, you thick dick!” she stormed. “Try to pin anything on me, I’ll teach you to mind your own goddam business.” She stabbed an accusing finger at Yaker. “He gimme that key. An’ I can prove it.”

  Yaker was too groggy to use discretion. “You’re a lousy liar!” he shouted at her. “I never gave you any—” Two husky waiters laid ungentle hands on him, hauled him to his feet.

  He took a feeble swing at one. The other grabbed Yaker’s arm, twisted it up behind his back. Yaker lunged. The table tipped. Glasses smashed. Plunging Neckline shrieked, flopped to the floor. Edie urged the waiters to throw me out, too. It was a merry melee.

  I’m well aware what the Hollywood version of a private eye would have done at that point. He’d have smashed the bottom off a club soda bottle, used it to defend himself against all comers. Or, in some miraculous fashion, knocked heads together until the bouncers whined for mercy. I wasn’t up to that stouthearted stuff right then. If ever.

  I’d had a sufficiency of rough and tumble for one twenty-four-hour period. Besides, I wanted to get Yaker out alive; it began to look as if they’d tear his arms off and beat him to death with ’em; three of them were muscling him—and for a guy who’d started with an alcoholic handicap, he was putting up a noble scrap.

  The headwaiter steamed over with two more bulky-chested waiters. Edie indicated I was the root of the fracas. The waiters circled behind me.

  I stood still. “Local 901?” I asked.

  That gave them pause. One of the circlers put his hand on my shoulder, but he didn’t grab me. They were all members of that club, had to be. They thought I might hold a union card, too.

  “Whassa trouble here?” The head man directed his question to me.

  “Any you boys know Auguste Fessler?” After twenty years in the business, one or the other of them should have.

  The waiter who had a hammerlock on Yaker called, “Works at the Plaza Royale? Yeah. I know Auguste.”

  I talked fast. There’s been a slight misunderstanding. If the lady’d been offended, we—I included Yaker in my apology—begged her pardon. It had all occurred simply because I’d been trying to get a waiter friend of mine, Auguste, out of a serious foul-up with the cops. I handed a ten to the headwaiter. “Take the check and breakage out, split the difference with the boys, huh?” They let us go. Edie poured vials of scorn on them for not batting our teeth in. But they didn’t want any more commotion; the ten-spot tempered their wrath. They helped me lead Yaker out to the street.

  He was a mess. A blossoming shiner. Nosebleed on Keith Walch’s fawn lapels. A loose tooth or a cut lip or both. But the fight had partly sobered him. He sobbed about scandal; his wife would kill him if she found out, so on.

  We piled in a taxi. He blubbered gratitude for getting him out in one piece.

  “Gotham Athletic,” I told the driver. Then I put it to Yaker. “What’s with that key? Did you give it to her, no kidding?”

  “No. I gave her my key. Like a dumb fool. So those kids could go up to my suite while I was still downstairs at the banquet.”

  He stuck to it. I thought he was leveling. He was a badly frightened man. All he wanted was to get straightened out, get his luggage, and go back to Philadelphia without having his family find out about the hassle.

  I told him he’d have to get Walch to arrange about his belongings. But when we got to the club, Walch wasn’t there. And wouldn’t be, according to the ducal clerk.

  “Mister Walch is out of town. Just left, few minutes ago.”

  “Yair? Where?”

  “Couldn’t say, sir.”

  “Kentucky, maybe?”

  He smiled as if he was on some amusing secret. “He does sometimes go there; that’s a fact.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: CASE OF JITTERS

  I’VE SEEN THE LAW OF AVERAGES repealed too often to put much faith in it. All the same, it did seem to apply to Roy Yaker. What the odds would be against there having been another big, blond, ruddy-faced guy of his height and build on the twenty-first floor the previous night, I couldn’t estimate. Million to one wouldn’t have been far off.

  Of course, if he’d been with Edie’s cream puffs all the time after leaving the hotel until his Lady Godiva performance on Park Avenue, he couldn’t very well have been the lad who trailed me from Manhasset. Or shot up my bus on Atlantic Avenue.

  But there were too many things, besides that key I’d taken from Edie, that he wasn’t able to clear up. Or willing to.

  When we left the Gotham, he turned to me in despair.

  “Now what the hell am I going to do? I haven’t any clothes or any money! I can’t get in Walch’s room if he’s not in town! I can’t go back home without any luggage!”

  I told him the first thing he needed was to get cleaned up, sobered up. I knew the place, if he’d agree to stay there until I decided it was okay.

  He had some friends in town, plenty more in Philly, but he didn’t want to let any of them know about his fix, for fear it would get back to his wife. So he agreed.

  In five minutes we were at Pud Hoffman’s Finnish Baths. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to farm out a jitter case to Pud; we had a routine established. Take away every stitch of the patient’s clothing. Stick him in the steam room until he was so weak he couldn’t get away without crutches. Let him sleep.

  While Yaker was undressing I inquired about the wax spots on his spread. Either he was completely
in the dark about them or else he was a more cagey customer than I rated him.

  I told him what I thought the wax had been used for; to cover fingerprints so a murderer couldn’t be traced. That threw him. He hadn’t known about any murder. Hadn’t ever been in 21MM at all. Knew Tildy Millett by sight and by name, but had never met her.

  Just before Pud shoved him in the steam room I mentioned Lanerd’s death. Yaker got so sick to his stomach I thought he was having convulsions. Pud thought he’d wilt if that heat hit him then; we put him in bed. He fell into a heavy sleep of nervous exhaustion without a twitch.

  It’s easy to fake a faint. Something else again to artificially induce an abdominal reaction like that. If the big lunk lying so limply on Pud’s cot had sliced one man and blown another’s brains out, Snow White was Baby Face Nelson in disguise.

  I called Tim. He was in shape for a strait jacket, trying to hold the wheel in my absence. If I would just hike back in a hurry, probably it could all be smoothed over with the front office. The lab boys had definitely determined Lanerd had suicided. The flare test showed powder traces on his right hand. His prints were on the laundry hamper too. And had I heard, that coat, the cream-colored dilly with the chocolate checks?

  “Whose was it? Reidy’s?”

  “Ha, ha.” A hollow chuckle. “Zingy traced it. Through the valet. It’s Lanerd’s. Matter of fact it was hangin’ up in his closet when this Schneider looks for it.”

  “So they think it’s open and shut?”

  “There were bloodstains on the coat, Chief. Jeeze, what more you want?”

  “I don’t know, Tim.” I didn’t. “Fran, maybe. She in?”

  “I let her off until midnight. She was on eighteen hours yesterday.”

  “Yair. ’S right. Any info about T.M.?”

  “Hacklin’s had word from her agent. He put her on board Lanerd’s yacht where she’ll be safe from this Gowriss until she has to testify before the Grand Jury tomorrow. Still, the reporters won’t be able to pester her.”

  “‘Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine.’”

  “Huh?”

  “A quote of no significance, Tim.”

  “Lissen, Chief. You haven’t still got that bee in y’r bonnet about Lanerd’s havin’ been murdered!”

  “Yair. I have. And it’s going to sting somebody yet.” I told him what I had in mind. What Lanerd had told Hacklin on the phone just before he died.

  At LaGuardia the next plane for Cincinnati was at nine peeyem. That left time for a leisurely session at the airport barbershop. While I waited for the white chair, I skimmed the early edition of our most sedate journal. They’d page-oned it: Dow Lanerd Found Dead in Hotel Suite.

  The copy desk had cut conjecture to the bone. The facts were accurate, far as they went. The famed Mr. Giveaway, promoter and developer of many leading radio and television programs had been discovered lying on the floor of a bathroom in his suite at the Plaza Royale, Fifth Avenue home of many socially prominent. He had been shot in the right temple by his own automatic pistol; preliminary police reports indicated the president of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright, internationally influential advertising agents, had shot himself.

  The assistant medical examiner placed the time of death at approximately nine p.m., Saturday evening. An informant at the office of the District Attorney suggested that the executive’s death might have been due to a temporarily unbalanced mental condition, following a fatal encounter with a member of the Prosecutor’s staff a short time before the suicide.

  There was a guarded reference to a violent dispute in connection with an unnamed woman who was being sought for questioning.

  Business and club associates of Lanerd professed the usual profound shock and sorrow, denied all knowledge of financial or domestic difficulties in the life of “the most successful advertising man of the decade.” Mrs. Lanerd, prostrated by the blow, could not be reached for comment.

  Reading between the lines, there remained an impression of a drunken brawl in some girl’s room, a fight and a fatality, followed by remorse and suicide. All very commonplace. Very unfortunate. Very silly.

  There was nothing concerning the note Tildy’d left for him, so people wouldn’t begin to get ideas about the Plaza Royale being a cozy spot to pitch a love nest. That was the only break the hotel got. Except that Auguste wasn’t mentioned.

  Under the lather and the hot towel, I went over it all. Lanerd, Auguste, Roffis, Gowriss, Ruth, Yaker, Edie, Walch, Marge, MacGregory, Nikky, Tildy. Aussi, the man in the taxi!

  All the juice I squeezed out of it was that in some strange manner, the blasting of a police informer down on the Bowery six days ago was connected with the death of a millionaire adman on Fifth Avenue. It didn’t add up.

  I totaled the columns over again while I watched the gas trucks under the wings of the DC6; later, as I marched up the ramp, grinned at the seductive sally in the stewardess uniform, strapped on my belt. I was still ponderin’ when we zoomed over the honeycomb of lighted windows that was New York, zipped across the strip of burnished metal that was the Hudson, gained altitude for the mountains.

  By the time we came down through a threatening thunderstorm, three hours later, to the field beside the Ohio, I’d reached one certain conclusion. Tildy Millett was the core of it; she probably knew the killer; certainly she knew what the cryptic “Never forget four” meant.

  At Cincinnati there was half an hour before the DC3 left for Lexington. I pushed through a call to New York, to Fran.

  She was contrite about letting Tildy get away from her at the Brulard. The skate star had called a bellman to see if he could buy her a hairbrush on Sunday; while the bellman had the door open, Tildy’d simply slipped out and run down the stairs.

  Fran’d had a horrible night with Tildy. It had taken the skater hours to get to sleep. Hours of tears, nerves, incoherencies. Even after the Rip Van Winkles had taken effect, the star of the Icequadrilles had tossed and writhed and moaned and talked in her uneasy slumber.

  Fran couldn’t make much out of it, beyond the constant calling for Dow—Dow—Dow. “Oh, one thing, Mister V. About half past three, when I thought she was quieting down, she began to laugh like a maniac.”

  “In her sleep?”

  “Sound asleep. Then she said, very clearly and bitterly, as if reproaching him, ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, hahahaha.’ It made my skin crawl to listen to her.”

  “That was all? No more? Just one and two. No four? Or seven?”

  “That was all. She did fall asleep then.”

  “Yair. Well. Go thou and do likewise. Thanks for a tough job.”

  “I’m not kidding. It was. I wish you’d stayed there, yourself!”

  “So do I. ’Night.”

  Chapter Thirty: SHOTGUN AND HATCHET

  IT WAS A ROUGH JAUNT. Night flights are usually smoother than day flying but that thunderstorm was chasing us all the way to the Bluegrass. The bumpy trip may have contributed to my gloom. When they pulled the ramp over to us at Lexington, the mercury was pole-vaulting up over the ninety mark. And I had cold feet.

  If I didn’t hurt anyone but myself it wouldn’t be so bad to canter around investigating a couple of grisly homicides in an entirely different direction from that taken by the duly constituted authorities. But if I was putting another person’s life in danger, and there seemed to be better than an even chance I was doing just that, then I had to consider the consequences. I did so, hence my gloom.

  It was all so lucid, way they figured it. Roffis stabbed in a scuffle because he tried to prevent Tildy and Dow from taking her belongings with her, en route to Rio and a divorce cum marriage. Auguste’s being given the compact to say he knew nothing about the guard’s death. Tildy’s subsequent turndown of her Casanova. His resulting suicide.

  If I hadn’t known about the wax spots and the finger marks—which weren’t fingerprints—on Tildy’s bedroom door, if it wasn’t for being trailed and shot at by someone who couldn’t have been Dow L.,
I might have accepted Hacklin’s view. As it was, I couldn’t shake off a conviction that the killer was still up and about, that there’d be another murder if I didn’t find the answer, but sudden.

  “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” It clattered around in my cranium like one of those idiotic singing commercials, while I coffeed and crullered. “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” What the hell? The tie-in with “Seven for a secret” and “Never forget four” seemed obvious. But the meaning was as murky as the skies when I went out to hire a hack.

  Thunder grumbled. Lightning flashes made the white fences stand out as if floodlighted, against the vivid green of thoroughbred pastures. The heat was oppressive.

  The cabdriver knew where Tildy Millett’s place was, sure. A show farm, Lovelawn was. Not many horses out there now, but he’d heard she planned to breed trotters next spring. Maybe she’d be breeding something else, too; there was talking about her latching up with some big advertising man.

  I chuckled at his feeble jest. Would he know whether she’d come home by plane, today?

  He wouldn’t know. He’d just come on at midnight. But it was only another mile down the pike; there were relatives living with her, if I wanted him to wait while I found out if she was there.

  It began to rain. We passed a famous racing stud whose colors I’d bet on often at the tracks. The whitewashed stables and paddocks, the parklike grounds, the long white fences loping over gently rolling hills—very picturesque. The Land of Gracious Living. As advertised. I was in no mood to appreciate it.

  Why had Lanerd said Tildy was on her way to Lexington when she hadn’t been? Why had Walch’s club thought he might be in Lexington, when he was on Long Island Sound? Most important, what followed “One for sorrow, two for mirth”?

  The cabdriver said, “Here’s Lovelawn. Hey, they got the chain on.” He stopped.

  Between fieldstone pillars a massive chain was padlocked.

  “I better wait for you, huh? It’s quite a piece up to the house. Maybe there’s nobody home, after all.”