Stewart Sterling - Dead of Night

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, high-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.”