Killer with a Key

by Dan J. Marlowe

  "I have four. In an hour, even--"

  "Any in the window?"

  "Let me look." Manny knew there were no Medallions in the window, but he was following Precept Number Two of Richard Harrison Stone, Jr. Give the customer a little action for his money. Check the window. Check the vault. Check the wastebaskets. Check anything. Move. Look alive. Look like you want the business. "Sorry, sir. Not another one in the shop."

  "Gimme the four." The fat man tossed a coarse handful of money on the counter top. "My girl'll have to shoot out and pick me up a couple while I stall 'em in the meeting."

  Manny looked thoughtfully after the departing rotund figure. He rubbed his chin; sure must be some promotion. Steam shovels, at least. Or locomotives. He wished he'd had the other two Medallions. How could you figure this business? You might sell two a month, ordinarily. If you were lucky. Now here they had snatched five away from him in a morning. Morning? He glanced at his watch. Hell, in an hour.

  He made a note on the "out" pad beside the register and looked up again as the glass doors parted majestically to admit Richard Harrison Stone, Jr. He watched the customary impressive entrance, inclining his own head in response to the curt nod he received, and his eyes followed the dignified ascent of the lean, aristocratic figure to the second floor offices. Automatically Manny straightened the set of the white linen jacket across his shoulders. He disliked the jacket, but the jacket constituted Precept Number One of Richard Harrison Stone, Jr. A potential customer, the owner was fond of saying smugly and often, finds a certain psychological block in dealing for a piece of expensive merchandise with a man better dressed than himself. Therefore a clerk should look like a clerk. Like a white-linen-jacketed clerk.

  Manny glanced back at the door as the morning's first customer re-entered the shop in a shambling trot and plowed toward him. The man's face was flushed, and he was obviously repressing emotion. He slapped down on the counter the wrapped package that Manny had given him.

  "Like to return this," he said carefully in a hoarse, strained voice. He tried to smile. "She wouldn't even look at it. Or at me."

  "Sorry," Manny murmured. "It happens." He toed the buzzer which would bring Max out from his watchmaking cubicle. Manny took his time making out the refund slip; beside him Max unobtrusively opened the package, looked carefully at the watch, checked the itemization on the refund slip, and silently returned the watch to the drawer beneath the counter. You never knew, Manny reflected. Even in a shop like this you could find someone trying a switch. It was never any problem, though; on a return you just called Max.

  The girl must really have given this boy a hard time, Manny thought as he made the refund and the unhappy gentleman departed. A woman-hater, till the next time. He glanced at his watch again. Eleven. Slow morning.

  And as though linked by an invisible wire he drifted down the counter and out to the front window, where he again lifted a fold of the drapery and looked across the street. Bright sunlight reflected from Sam's window and dazzled him. He dropped the drapery. So you can't see, Kessler. You need to see? Sam is standing there. Watching. Waiting.

  Manny's full lips twitched. Sam was mad at Stone, all right; Sam was purely out-of-his-mind mad at Stone, but Sam was mad at Manny, too. Manny had worked for Sam, before and after the breakup of the partnership. And then Stone had come after Manny and made him a very, very good offer. Sam would have matched it, of course. Sam would have screamed like a stuck whistle on the Staten Island ferry, but he would have matched it. Sam had liked Manny. Manny had kind of liked Sam, too, but he hadn't given Sam a chance to match the offer. Are you a fool, Kessler? he had asked himself. Look at them. Look at Sam's place, and look at Stone's. All right, Stone's a gonnif, but he's going places. His money spends. Manny had gone with Stone.

  On quiet mornings like this he sometimes wondered about that decision. Not that Sam could do anything. Not that--

  He turned at the sound of the doors and looked at the overdressed blonde pushing her way inside. She was followed by a man in a dark suit, and both of them by a big man in a rich-looking sport coat and light-colored slacks. The big man wore an expensive panama with a too-wide brim, and he had a livid scar that pulled down a corner of the heavy mouth slightly.

  Manny looked at the blonde, and a little warning bell jangled in his mind. Sometimes you got a feeling. A beef-even here you had to get one once in a while. The blonde looked in Manny's direction and pointed. He sighed; it figured.

  "That the one?" the big man demanded. His voice was fantastically deep. You surely should be able to hear him a quarter mile upwind in a storm, Manny thought. The voice rumbled at him as the big man advanced upon the counter. "You, there." He dangled a watch suspended from a bracelet in Manny's face. "You sold my girl a phony watch. Don't try to deny it."

  "If I might just see the watch," Manny said in his patiently courteous voice, "I might not have to deny it."

  "Here." The big man thrust it at him. "Lost thirty minutes every day she's had it, and--"

  "Occasionally even a new one needs an adjustment," Manny wedged into the roar of the waterfall. He looked at the watch--a Medallion. Another Medallion. He looked at the blonde and remembered. She had bought it last week. On Medallions this morning they were in a rut so deep it was a trench. He turned back to the big man. "If you will kindly permit our watchmaker to--"

  "Will you listen to me?" He had never heard such a voice, Manny thought. If crystalware had been on display, it would surely have been shattered by now. "I know they need adjusting sometimes. When Nora told me she was having trouble with it I thought I'd save her a trip across town. Took it to my own man, and when he looked at it he said it's got a movement he can buy for two dollars and a half."

  "Impossible," Manny said at once. He made sure that his voice was polite but firm. He toed the buzzer for Max and handed over the watch when the stooped little watchmaker appeared. Max fumbled uneasily with his leather apron; he always looked uncomfortable in the front of the shop. He listened to Manny's quick explanation, automatically inserted his loupe in his eye and delicately unscrewed the back of the case. His head came up at once.

  "The watch came from here?" he asked carefully, and the blonde fumbled in her bag and produced a sales' slip which she waved at him.

  "I remember the sale," Manny said. He thought that his voice sounded a little faint; he tried to strengthen it. "Distinctly."

  Max cleared his throat. "It is not a Medallion movement."

  Manny stared at him, and the man in the dark suit spoke for the first time. Manny observed now that he had a hard, authoritative face. "You got any more of these watches here?"

  "No," Manny began, then remembered the lovelorn suitor.

  "Wait. We do have." He opened the drawer. "Here."

  "Open it up," the man in the dark suit said to Max. His tone was brusque. Manny found himself leaning forward on tiptoe to see more clearly, and when the back came off the case and he saw the look on Max's usually stolid features he felt as though his own stomach had turned over.

  The man had seen the look, too. He took both watches back from Max and removed from his pocket a leather billfold, which he opened. Manny caught the flash of metal.

  "D.A.'s Racket Squad," the man said curtly. "You the owner here?"

  Automatically Manny's eyes went aloft. "No. Mr. Stone--"

  "Let's all go upstairs and see Mr. Stone, boys."

  CHAPTER 3

  Johnny glanced at the clock over the bell captain's desk in the recessed niche between the elevators as he emerged into the semi-darkened lobby. Five after three. He crossed directly to the marbled registration desk.

  His final try upstairs had been unable to get a word out of Ellen. She had sunk bonelessly upon the bed in the room to which he had taken her and had turned her face to the wall. Please, she had said in reply to all his prodding. Please. Not now. Let me rest. Let me think. Please.

  A hundred irritated questions had crowded up behind his teeth, but he had kept the tee
th locked. Let her settle down. It had better be soon, though; whatever it was that had scared her was no damn joke. Four slugs in the door against which they'd been standing was no joke at all.

  He leaned over the registration counter, craning to look for Vic Barnes, the night front-desk man. He slapped an open palm down on the smooth surface. "Vic!"

  "Yo, John." Vic ambled up from behind the cashier's wicket, threading his way along the narrow aisle which separated the rear of the counter from the mail rack. He looked at Johnny inquiringly. Vic was a stocky, middle-aged man in a clerk's black alpaca jacket; he had a smooth, round face and pink cheeks with a glossy sheen upon the skin that made it seem waxed. He had sparse sandy hair rapidly turning gray, combed straight back from a high forehead, and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles low on the bridge of his nose. It was an easygoing face; Vic was an easygoing man.

  "Couldn't see you back there," Johnny told him. "Listen. Block out 629 for me."

  Vic pursed full lips. "Fun and games again? When you gonna grow up, John?" He shook his head doubtfully, but he was already reaching for the room rack, pencil in hand.

  "I'll have her out of there by daylight. Are we going fishing Thursday morning with Mike? He's already asked me three times."

  "Tell him yes, then," Vic replied promptly. "It's his gas he's going to burn." He reached for his phone as it rang. "Front desk, Barnes. Oh, hello there. Still up? You should --who? Why, no, I don't--"

  Johnny turned away and walked back to his bell-captain's desk. He removed his big flashlight from the lower drawer and re-crossed the lobby to the telephone switchboard at the far end of the registration desk. He leaned his elbows on the little gate that set the board off from the lobby proper and looked in at Sally Fontaine, its headphoned night operator. "Hi, Ma."

  His voice brought her head up, and she smiled out at him. She nodded at the light in his hand. "Prowling again?"

  "Yeah. Paul go out?"

  "Just for coffee."

  "Tell him where he can find me when he gets back."

  She inclined her head as the board buzzed. She pulled a plug and the buzzing stopped, and she looked out at him again. She was a small girl, almost painfully thin. She might have been thirty. Her nose was short and tiptilted, and her brown hair was an indeterminate shade very nearly justifying the adjective mousy. The brown eyes and the too generous mouth smiled easily and warmly.

  Johnny spoke softly into the lobby's hush. "You comin' up in the mornin', Ma? Business meetin'."

  "A likely story, Johnny Killain."

  "Surest thing you ever heard. Business meetin' to consider the settin' up of a joint venture, the deal open only to the subscribin' partners." He grinned at her. "Who're you 'n me. You a customer?"

  "Any capital required?"

  "You're totin' your assets, kid."

  "I am? What's the valuation?"

  "The assessor's report isn't in yet, but I got a feelin' it's high grade ore. You gonna see me in the mornin', Ma?"

  She smiled, and the severe planes of the narrow face lightened remarkably. She looked like a different person. "A girl could get a reputation, seeing you in the mornings."

  "She could earn it, too."

  "You don't seem to manage your business affairs very discreetly. With a new manager around here--"

  "Hell with him. You be there."

  She smiled again, and waved as he turned. He walked across to the wide flight of marbled stairs leading up to the mezzanine and started up. The hotel had a night watchman, but he was not a hotel employee; he was from a protective association, and he had other stops in the block. Years ago Johnny had formed the habit of making a swing himself around the mezzanine and the ground floor, usually around three in the morning when things had quieted down. Once in a while a drunk fell asleep upstairs in the lounge, or one of the stores on the mezzanine forgot to lock up at closing time.

  It was not a large hotel; four hundred and twenty-five rooms, give or take a few always in the process of redecoration. It was not a new hotel; a slightly shabby comfort had its own attraction for a number of people who preferred a certain quiet dullness to a bright and shining newness with its accompanying sharp edges. The hotel was understaffed, like most such, particularly on the night side. Johnny, Vic, Paul, and Sally had had it to themselves as a regular crew for seven or eight years, with occasional and inconsequential help from part-time bellboys and elevator operators.

  A good many years ago it had been a first-class hotel, but the neighborhood had changed and the theatrical people who had once patronized it extensively had now moved across Broadway. Because of its midtown location it still had a steady businessman clientele and a number of permanents, some of whom had been there for years.

  Johnny swung up on the landing, past the executive offices, and turned right. He hurried as he swept the bulls'-eye flash around the dim shadows of the interior lounge; he wanted to get back upstairs. He could easily hear the echoing sound of his heels in the quiet as he walked down the far side of the mezzanine and tried the doors of the travel bureau, the barber shop, the beauty shop, the haberdashery, the theatre ticket agency and the public stenographer's office. Satisfied, he descended the same flight of stairs to the main floor lobby and cut back underneath through the muraled swinging doors which led into the bar, dark except for the night light.

  He walked down its long expanse and removed a key from a clip on the band of his wrist watch. He unlocked the door at the far end of the bar leading into the kitchen and, flashlight in hand, made a quick circuit of the cavernously gloomy area whose long stainless-steel counters sprang to glistening life under the probing beam of the light. He tried the fire door at the back end of the huge room, the padlocked doors on the walk-in boxes and the hooked catches on the windows, and returning to his starting point let himself out and re-locked the door.

  Back in the lobby he returned to the registration desk and found Paul behind it, idly turning the pages of the early edition. "Vic go out? How soon's he due back?"

  "Any time." Paul glanced at his watch. "He's a little overdue right now. Another couple of minutes, probably."

  Johnny hesitated, and Paul looked at him inquiringly. Paul, the elevator operator, was a slender man, four or five years older than Johnny's thirty-five; his hair was dark and slicked down closely to a small skull. He had a stolid, unimaginative face, but a firm mouth and chin; Paul was reliable. "I want you to cover for me," Johnny explained. "I need to run upstairs a few minutes."

  "So go ahead," Paul said at once, folding up his paper. "Vic'll be back in a minute. I'm not likely to get any conventions to check in till he gets here."

  "It's quiet enough," Johnny agreed. "Okay. If you need me ring 629. It's not on the board."

  Paul nodded. As he turned away from the desk Johnny reflected that one of Paul's primary virtues was that he needed no diagrams.

  Johnny stepped out into the sixth-floor corridor after anchoring the cab of the service elevator with a slab of wood, and a flash of white at the end of the hall caught his eye. He looked more closely and discovered a white kitten galloping in spurting dashes, twin white paws batting at a dustball. "What the hell?" Johnny was surprised to find that he had said it aloud. There couldn't be two white kittens in this place. Not on the sixth floor, anyway. This kitten should have been behind the door of 629, and since it wasn't something was wrong.

  He advanced on the kitten, which wheeled to confront him. When Johnny was half a dozen paces away the small back arched slowly, and the white fur seemed to swell enormously, especially around the neck. A long, surprisingly loud hiss accompanied this display of defiance, and Johnny laughed as he dropped to his knees. "You need a new matchmaker, white stuff; you're givin' away too much weight." He extended a finger, slowly and steadily, and the kitten watched its approach, eyes of an unexpectedly bright blue fearlessly studying the problem. Johnny ran the finger right up to the ridiculous whiskers, and in movement too quick to follow the kitten turned its head and seized the finger in i
ts mouth.

  It was not a bite; Johnny could feel the impression of the needle-like little fangs, but he knew it was just a holding action while the kitten debated the seriousness of the assault. With his left hand he scooped up the small body, and the fangs closed down. Johnny stood up and worked his finger free, and he and Sassy looked down at the two bright drops of blood which dotted its surface. "Okay, tiger; you won a battle, but you lost the war. It's happened to heavyweights. Now let's go see how you got out here."

  With the kitten riding his arm he turned back down the corridor to 629. He could see that the door was tightly closed as he approached it, and his feeling of unease increased. He couldn't imagine Ellen Saxon opening the door of that room to anyone in the mood in which he had left her, yet somehow the kitten had gotten out into the hall.

  At the door he fumbled for his pass key. Then the door opened inward suddenly as he reached for the lock, and Vic Barnes stood teetering on the threshold, breast-to-breast with Johnny.

  Vic's face was ghastly, perspiration streamed down the faded, round cheeks, and the eyes were all whites. Vic's mouth opened convulsively, but no sound emerged; he half turned to look back over his shoulder, and rubberlegged a sideways step as Johnny impatiently pushed past him and inside.

  A stride beyond the door he stopped in his tracks.

  Ellen Saxon lay on the bed where he had left her; for a long moment Johnny stared in disbelief at the twisted limbs, the outflung arm with which she had sought in vain to protect herself, the so-well-remembered face that was now a death mask of horror. A puffed, blue, strangulated horror.

  He drew a harsh breath and crossed the room in a lunge. He felt for a pulse and dropped the limp wrist hopelessly. There was no pulse. Ellen--he still couldn't believe it.

  He fought his way back up to the surface; he couldn't seem to get off dead center mentally. He forced himself to lean forward and look more closely at Ellen's outthrust arm and hand; he avoided looking at her face. When he turned to Vic he didn't recognize his own voice. "What were you doing up here, Vic?"