Майкл Бретт - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 36, No. 6, June, 1975

“Ah, Mr. Frensham, sir, I was about to request permission to see you,” the hall porter said. There was a note of excitement in his voice, but suppressed to the level of good sober conduct.

“You were? You’ve remembered something vital?” the manager asked eagerly.

“I think it might be considered vital, Mr. Frensham, sir. At least worth reporting. With your permission, sir.”

“That’s fine, Billington. Let’s sit down. Inspector Marshall will be interested in anything you have to tell him, even if it’s only a mere theory.”

Five minutes after the hall porter began his clipped guardroom-style report, Inspector Marshall and the manager were making a bee-line for the latter’s office. The inspector waited impatiently while the manager thumbed feverishly through a thick file.

Then, a few minutes after the manager had found what he was looking for, the C.I.D. man was leaping in beside the driver of a police-car which had been waiting for him in the Hotel International’s car park.

He rapped out an address to the driver — a flat in a tall Victorian block not very far from the hotel.

And in scarcely any time at all, it seemed Marshall was listening at the door of flat seven as light scuffling footsteps sounded inside.

“Well, she’s coming all right,” he whispered to Detective-Constable Blakey, his face alight with anticipation. “And if it’s our girl, she won’t have had time to get rid of any of the—”

He broke off abruptly as the door was opened. A young brunette stood frowning at him. She was dark-skinned, dark-haired, her mouth large and sullen, her manner vaguely sluttish. He had seen more attractive Italian girls, Marshall told himself.

She was busy tying the belt of a thin wrap that enveloped her body, slim but full-breasted. She might or might not have been wearing some flimsy night garment beneath.

“Miss Maria Rossini?”

“Yes.”

Marshall introduced himself and Detective-Constable Blakey and they produced their police-credentials. “May we talk with you for a bit?”

“Yes, but…”

The two detectives had walked into the living-room of her flat before receiving her formal invitation. Marshall’s eyes ranged busily over the room, even taking in most of the girl’s bedroom, visible through an open door. He was particularly interested in what lay on the bed.

“That coat lying on the bed in there — yours, Miss?”

“Yes.” She had hesitated a moment, a convulsive movement in her throat.

Marshall walked briskly to the bedroom door, looked more closely at the coat.

“H’m… a double-breasted mackintosh, buttoning up both sides, light brown, bit soiled. On the roomy side for you. Miss… but good camouflage for…” His eyes flicked to the mounds of her breasts. “Certainly nice, deep, roomy pockets.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Her voice had a tremble in it. It could have been fear or anger.

“It’s a man’s coat,” Marshall said, watching her.

She swallowed again. Then her nostrils flared and a defiant look came into the smouldering eyes. “I do sometimes have gentlemen friends calling on me.”

“And they leave their coats when they go, do they? Oh, no, Miss Rossini, you aren’t entertaining any gentlemen tonight. You have been much too busy. Shall we look in those roomy pockets and see what’s inside them…?”

“No!” she shrieked out as he moved toward the coat.

Then, as he picked the coat up, she sprang at him, punching, scratching, biting, kicking. In that slim, lithe body was an animal strength that amazed him. Her red fingernails were like stilettos, her white teeth like wolfs fangs. Marshall endured them all, plus a crippling blow from her knee, before Blakey managed to pin her arms from behind and drag her away.

“Phew!” Marshall exploded, panted. He felt bruised and torn, but, by gum, it had been worth it, he thought.

She had been so sure of herself, so sure they’d never look for her, that she hadn’t even bothered to take the pieces of jewelry from the coat-pockets. Well, they’d start looking for a man, she had thought, not for a girl…

“Her short hair’s not really short enough to look masculine,” Marshall said, studying her. “We’d better see if there’s a man’s dark wig somewhere. And maybe a false moustache… unless she put that on with eye-black…”

The Italian girl spat out an obscenity. Marshall turned casually to her. “Better get some clothes on, love,” he said. “We’re going for a little trip.”

Later Marshall was sitting with the manager of the Hotel International and hall porter, Billington.

“You can see what happened, Mr. Frensham,” the detective said. “After you had sacked this chambermaid, Maria Rossini, she somehow contrived, while working out her week’s notice, to borrow a set of master-keys to the first-floor rooms and take wax impressions of them. Maybe some shady boyfriend put her up to that one.

“Then, with a set of keys made from wax molds, she came back on the night of the Grand Gala Dance. She knew the upper rooms would be deserted, and was helped by the fact that your house-detective was out of action.

“She came dressed in a man’s old mackintosh coat and disguished as a man. The bulky coat camouflaged her feminine curves, and the pockets held the chloroform pad she drugged the chambermaid with and also accommodated the loot as she went around collecting it.

“Her big mistake,” Marshall added, smiling, “was ever to unbutton that coat. But even a jewel thief must sometimes pay an urgent visit to the powder-room. Or would she have been wise to have used the other place?”

They laughed.

“It’s my old army training, sir,” Billington said. “Being a real old sweat and a sergeant-major and that. I mean, Mr. Frensham, sir, I can’t help noticing little oddities of dress… keeping a weather-eye open for irregularities of buttons and flaps and things.”

The manager and the inspector were trying not to treat the matter with levity.

“Came to me in a flash, sir. That was no man, I said to myself, that was a woman! I mean, sir, a man buttons a coat left over right, doesn’t he? And here was this shower of a fellow — or Eye-tye bird, if you’ll pardon the term, sir — walking towards the door, buttoning the coat right over left. Sissy, I thought. Then I had another think a bit later.”

“Lucky you did, Sergeant-Major,” said Marshall.

Varig was a gambling man — surely he’d bet on a sure thing, like an insurance policy on my nagging wife…

Sitting in the car next to Paul Varig I admired the precise way he drove. We were on the mountain road heading toward Lake Tahoe. Varig is a professional gambler. I recalled how we had met in Las Vegas six months ago.

My wife Martha and I had gone there for the first time on a ten day vacation. I gambled and after we were there a week I had won a thousand dollars.

Beginner’s luck. All right, I admit it. What still bugs me is that if Martha hadn’t been with me I would have run the thousand dollars up to a fortune. There was no question about it.

What happened is that we had just enough money for the stay at the hotel plus a hundred dollars for gambling. Anybody in his right mind knows that isn’t enough. A run of bad luck and you’ve had it. You’re wiped out and that’s the end of the fun.

Of course you can spend the rest of your vacation lounging around the pool and getting a tan if you’re a physical health bug, or you can even fill in the hours playing golf. And you don’t have to fly all the way to Las Vegas to do that. Martha and I had flown twenty-eight-hundred miles to get there.