Tom Hoke - Murder in the Grand Manor

"How did you know I was here?"

"Heard them talking about you," Jerry announced, nodding his head.

"Who?"

"Never mind who. Never mind." He reached over the side of the bed with some difficulty, picked off the bottle of whiskey and concentrated on opening it.

"Wait a minute before you take another slug."

Jerry's brow puckered into a most unbecoming frown. Jerry's eyes looked puzzled. He opened the bottle and asked, "Drink?"

Jim took another tack. "So now you own the hotel. What are you celebrating? It's a liability.

And what happened to your Aunt, Jerry?"

"They musta killed her," he mumbled. Then he waved the bottle. "Aunt Edith wouldn't talk…they might have known that. She had guts, plain old guts. I didn't like her, but she had guts." He grabbed at Jim’s shirt with one hand. "She wrote me! I ain't afraid of what she was afraid of, but they want me because they think I know and nobody else does. They'll kill me too! After I tell them what I know…they'll kill me. Hide me, Jim…hide me!"

"What do you know?"

He upended the bottle and leered at Jim. "I won't tell." He looked at the bottle and back at him in surprise. Jim came out of his chair and shook Jerry. "Where are your Aunt's rooms, Jerry? Where?" Duprey sank back on the pillow and his eyes glazed over, but he pointed to the ceiling. He spoke a couple of unintelligible words and conked out.

Jim looked at him in exasperation. Just where did he think he could hide him? If he went wandering about the hotel dragging Jerry after him, because he couldn't carry him over his shoulder, he would run into almost anybody.

And almost anybody was apparently already searching for Jerry Duprey.

Jim went through Jerry's pockets and came up with nothing he could use. So Aunt Edith wouldn't tell, but Jerry would! Just what would he tell? How would Jim know? It was small satisfaction to him if somebody picked Duprey off. What he knew about the Grand Manor, except for the back stairs, the room over Aunt Annie's, and the bar, was nothing.

He rolled Jerry under his bed. Even this took a bit of doing. Jim pushed the inert body until Duprey was up against the far wall. As a kind gesture, he rolled up the bath mat, crawled under the bed, and stuck the mat under Dupreys head. A missing pillow might give whoever they were an idea. For once Jerry wasn't snoring. However it wouldn't have mattered much because the sudden wild wind tearing at the ivy around the window would have drowned him out.

Jim made up the bed carefully. Then he sat down, wondering why he had ever thought of stopping the characters that had Beau Mitchell cornered in San Antonio.

The whole mess hinged on Aunt Edith's letter to Jerry. Jim was hot, sweating, disgusted, and curious. Here he was in the middle of a hurricane with a dead body upstairs, the question of the quick dispatch of Mrs. Benning, two zany females who had adopted him, and Jerry Duprey. He remembered Jerry had cost him a grand. But he was not so disgusted his eye didn't catch the turning of the doorknob.

He gave the doorknob his undivided attention.

It turned to the right and to the left. Jim had heard no footsteps, but who could with all the noise outside? Jerry, even under the bed, didn't need a visitor. Neither did Jim. He promised himself he had first dibs on Duprey when he came out of his stupor. There were a couple of million answers he needed from him.

Jim began to whistle loudly and stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower hard.

The doorknob stopped turning. Switching off the light, he unlocked the door and stuck his head out into the hall. There was nobody in the grim uncarpeted length.

He locked the door of his room and went quickly to the back stairs. Aunt Annie had given him thirty minutes, and he was running out of time. But he wanted to have a look at Mrs. Benning's quarters. Why had the girls acted so strange over his sarcastic description of the late Mrs. Benning? Among other things, he wanted to see if the recently deceased bellboy was still in the room over Aunt Annie's.

The last was easy. There was no body and nobody in the room where he had seen the body the night before. Getting rid of him must have been quite a chore, he thought, as he went on down the hall.

It stood to reason Mrs. Benning, being the owner of the Grand Manor, would have the pick of the crop, if there was such a thing. Her rooms were at the front of the hotel overlooking the bay. He stopped and tried the door. It wasn't locked, but it wouldn't have mattered. Jim’s key would have fit the lock, just as it probably would every room in the hotel. That's why there was another deadbolt lock on the inside.

For once he hit the jackpot as he entered, closed the door, and took a step forward reaching for the light switch. It was Edith Benning's parlor. He stumbled over something on the floor. The stark, center light changed his mind about giving it a swift kick. He discovered he had fallen over a good old-fashioned solid doorstop about the size of a brick and weighing at least a ton from the way his foot felt. Limping over to a scarred veneer table loaded with bric-a-brac, he pulled the ornate cord of the heavily beaded lamp with less wattage than the center light. He limped back to the door and turned off the center light.

Then he looked around and winced.

Jim knew an antique dealer who would go stark, raving insane at the conglomeration of furniture in Mrs. Benning's parlor. He also knew enough to spot the only really valuable piece of furniture in the room, a walnut Queen Anne chair that had to go back to the early seventeen hundreds stood out like a sore thumb. He drew a deep breath, wishing it belonged to him. Jerry would never appreciate it.

In this room the Queen Anne chair was desecrated by rococo tables of various sizes, all loaded down with unappealing dusty ferns in overly large pots. He shuddered over a lumpy unstable couch covered with small pillows adorned with names of various states and long fringes. Antimacassars were pinned to the arms and backs of the divan and the hideous chairs, except for one, the Queen Anne. Aunt Edith must have been doorstop happy. They were all over the place, holding down stacks and stacks of newspapers, holding back the doors to the next room. There was even one set on top of the out-dated magazines on the table. They looked like a bunch of bricks rolled up in dirty brown carpeting. But he forgave Aunt Edith all her atrocities. The Queen Anne chair was beautiful.

There was only one picture on the west wall. It was a large religious painting, if you could call it that, made up of burnt match sticks! He cringed as he glanced at it, looked longingly at the Queen Anne chair, and went into the next room.

The next room was an office. An open door to the left showed a small bathroom. Someone had really torn up Mrs. Benning's office. The filing cabinet beside an old oak desk had been emptied on the floor. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out. The swivel chair was tipped over against a closet door. Jim righted it and looked in the closet. It was lined with shelves. It had the treatment too. He didn't give this room much of his time. No use in trying to find something when he didn't know what he was after in the first place, especially since someone else had already beaten him to it.

He glanced at his watch. Aunt Annie and Lena would be looking for him. But he had to see Aunt Edith's bedroom. There were no pictures in the office, and more than anything, he wanted to see the portrait of Mrs. Edith Benning. He stepped into the next room. It was heavy with massive furniture. The four posters of the mahogany single bed reached to the ceiling. To the left of the bed was a great, ugly monstrosity of a dresser, with the drawers opened and clothing dumped out on the floor.

A large box of candy with the lid half-off and a hairbrush were the only items left on the top of the dresser.