Stewart Sterling - Dead of Night

“Maybe she figures he eloped with Tildy Millett.”

He moved aside to let a couple of buckets of champagne get around him. “What I’d like to know is where Lanerd found out she was heading for Kentucky.”

The waiters’ recreation room is off in the corner of the service basement, beyond the silver-cleaning drums. I could tell there was something unusual afoot before we reached it. Three of our main-dining-room garçons blocked the doorway, watching something in the smoking-room. None of them spoke to me because they didn’t know Hacklin.

What they were watching was Auguste, in shirtsleeves, shorts, and socks. Practically in tears, besides. He stood, shamefaced, beside the table where the boys sometimes played gin rummy or tarot. Schneider stood beside him, feeling in the toe of one of Auguste’s shoes. The mess jacket hung on a chair back. Auguste’s trousers lay rumpled on the table.

Auguste saw me at the same time Schneider noticed Hacklin. They began simultaneously.

“Mister Fine, oh, pleasze!”

“Hi, Byrd. I guess this does it.”

I touched Hacklin’s arm. “The search routine is all right. But no vile durance. Remember?”

Hacklin didn’t answer. He gawked at the glittering gadget Schneider juggled in his palm. A compact. But something ultra. Engine-turned platinum, the turnings like the figures fancy skaters make on ice. Studded with diamonds. Sparklers around the circular rim. More glitter forming a nice neat T in the center. Quite an item.

“He had it in his sock.” Schneider flipped the back of his hand at Auguste’s middle. Auguste practically jumped out of his socket. “Good thing I thought of comin’ back here, looking for the crut.”

Auguste cried, “Mister Fine, Mister Fine, pleasze! Miss Millett, she gifts me this. A preszent, yesz. I tell him so, but he will not belief!”

Hacklin grinned at me with no humor whatever. “That deal we made. I guess you won’t mind if we call that off now?”

That was a bad spot.

I knew they had to take Auguste. They’d have been derelict if they didn’t. Presumably neither Hacklin nor Schneider knew about Auguste’s having quarreled with Roffis. Or his background of belligerency.

Still, the steak knife, the blood on his sleeve, that ridiculous numbers clipping, they were enough. Even without this compact. The compact wasn’t precisely the sort of trivia a guest hands out as cumshaw. More likely the kind of article included on some jewelry insurance inventory.

So Auguste was in for it. No matter what I did.

But a security man stands or falls, depending on whether he has his staff with him or agin him. We’re hired to keep order in a city, a vertical city to be sure, but one with more transients moving in and out every day than, say, a city like Northampton, Massachusetts. Yet we don’t really have any power or authority. No night sticks or hip holsters. It’s all done with mirrors. We have to depend on employees for information and backing. No protection man rates that sort of support unless the staff knows he’ll go to bat for an employee if and when necessary.

So I couldn’t just let them walk out with Auguste. In five minutes the bunch on the grapevine would have spread the word all over the house.

“Auguste,” I said, “when’d she give you this?”

“This efening, Mister Fine. While I am bringing in the tables.” Shame and resentment made his face older; standing there with his bony shanks and knobby knees showing below the draggling, striped shorts, he was a miserable specimen. “With efery Tower room-serfice order, we are always szending a rose. But Miss Millett she does not like roszes. For her I haf perzonally arrange with each tray a camellia, pink. Always she is ferry pleaszed, she mentions how pleaszed. Tonight she says she may soon be going away — and for my thoughtfulnesz, is there anything she could do for me?”

“Come on!” Schneider threw the pants at him. “Climb into those. Le’s get going. You c’n spill that mahooly downtown—”

I interrupted. “Take your time, Auguste.” It wasn’t a necessary remark; his fingers trembled so he couldn’t fasten the buttons. I was talking for the benefit of the boys in the doorway. “Go on. She asked what kind of gratuity would suit you.”

“No szir, pleasze, she did not. I told her I would prefer zum little trinket by which to remember a moszt gracious lady.”

Hacklin laughed harshly. “You certainly picked yourself a cheap little trinket. Musta cost a thousand, at least. Who you think you kiddin’? You stole this compact!”

“You haf only to ask her.” Auguste got the trousers on with difficulty; he had the shakes but good. “Myself, when she goes to her bag and brings out this,” he pointed a bony finger at the compact, “I am flibber-gaszted. It is too much, I proteszt, but she inzists it is szomething for which she will have no more use and she wiszhes me to take it. So I thank her many times and I do take it. When I change into messz jacket, the compact makes bulge in pantz pocket so I put it where I keep my wallet moszt always when I am on serfice.” I suppose Hacklin and Schneider thought that was just so much parsley, though, remembering what Elsie Dowd had said about Miss Marino, I was ready to believe it. Until we could check on it. As for keeping it in his sock, that’s where any waiter would conceal a valuable.

But there were ugly implications. If Auguste had overheard some remark about her clearing out, as a result of being scared of Mrs. Lanerd or of Al Gowriss, he might have decided to make a grab while the grabbing wouldn’t be noticed. Or at least when she wouldn’t be likely to come back for the stolen article.

Put it another way, the compact might have been payment for overlooking something Tildy Millett didn’t want talked about. An affair with Lanerd, maybe. Or a man’s body in a closet.

Schneider took the mess jacket off the chair, held it out for Auguste to put on. “If she gave it to you, you’ll get it back, jughead. If she didn’t, you won’t get back, yourself. C’mon, now.”

“Auguste,” I said, “how long have you known Miss Marino’s identity?”

“Crysake,” Hacklin muttered. “That’s right. The name was never supposed to be mentioned while any hotel people were around. How ’bout that, huh?”

Auguste sputtered. “When she firszt — when she gafe me the compact, so I would know who I should remember — she told me then, but I muszt promise — now I haf broken—” He was broken up about it, all right. “I do not wiszh cause any trouble for her—”

I gave him the big pat on the shoulder, took his arm. “You’re not, Auguste. You’re helping. Come along with us; we’ll get her to verify the gift; everything’ll be hokaydory.” I led him out of the recreation room before Schneider could do more than grab his other arm. Hacklin tagged along behind as we went through the door.

I spoke to the listening group of waiters. “Don’t talk about this until Auguste gets back, a’right, boys?”

“Absotively,” they agreed. “Sure thing, Mister V.”

“You gonna hock that an’ buy a chicken farm, ’Guste?”

He sniggered feebly. It made him feel a little less as if he was being marched off to a dungeon.

Schneider didn’t enthuse about my leading role. When we got out to the clanking silver-polishing drums, he growled, “Never mind comin’ any farther, Vine.”

“You couldn’t find your way down here. You’d wind up in the glass-sterilizer room. Auguste,” I went on quickly, “these men will try to hold you for stealing that compact. What they expect to do is link you up with the murder. I know you didn’t do it. I’ll get you out. Keep that left hand up and your chin in.”