Stewart Sterling - Dead of Night

I’d had a sufficiency of rough and tumble for one twenty-four-hour period. Besides, I wanted to get Yaker out alive; it began to look as if they’d tear his arms off and beat him to death with ’em; three of them were muscling him — and for a guy who’d started with an alcoholic handicap, he was putting up a noble scrap.

The headwaiter steamed over with two more bulky-chested waiters. Edie indicated I was the root of the fracas. The waiters circled behind me.

I stood still. “Local 901?” I asked.

That gave them pause. One of the circlers put his hand on my shoulder, but he didn’t grab me. They were all members of that club, had to be. They thought I might hold a union card, too.

“Whassa trouble here?” The head man directed his question to me.

“Any you boys know Auguste Fessler?” After twenty years in the business, one or the other of them should have.

The waiter who had a hammerlock on Yaker called, “Works at the Plaza Royale? Yeah. I know Auguste.”

I talked fast. There’s been a slight misunderstanding. If the lady’d been offended, we — I included Yaker in my apology — begged her pardon. It had all occurred simply because I’d been trying to get a waiter friend of mine, Auguste, out of a serious foul-up with the cops. I handed a ten to the headwaiter. “Take the check and breakage out, split the difference with the boys, huh?” They let us go. Edie poured vials of scorn on them for not batting our teeth in. But they didn’t want any more commotion; the ten-spot tempered their wrath. They helped me lead Yaker out to the street.

He was a mess. A blossoming shiner. Nosebleed on Keith Walch’s fawn lapels. A loose tooth or a cut lip or both. But the fight had partly sobered him. He sobbed about scandal; his wife would kill him if she found out, so on.

We piled in a taxi. He blubbered gratitude for getting him out in one piece.

“Gotham Athletic,” I told the driver. Then I put it to Yaker. “What’s with that key? Did you give it to her, no kidding?”

“No. I gave her my key. Like a dumb fool. So those kids could go up to my suite while I was still downstairs at the banquet.”

He stuck to it. I thought he was leveling. He was a badly frightened man. All he wanted was to get straightened out, get his luggage, and go back to Philadelphia without having his family find out about the hassle.

I told him he’d have to get Walch to arrange about his belongings. But when we got to the club, Walch wasn’t there. And wouldn’t be, according to the ducal clerk.

“Mister Walch is out of town. Just left, few minutes ago.”

“Yair? Where?”

“Couldn’t say, sir.”

“Kentucky, maybe?”

He smiled as if he was on some amusing secret. “He does sometimes go there; that’s a fact.”

I’ve seen the law of averages repealed too often to put much faith in it. All the same, it did seem to apply to Roy Yaker. What the odds would be against there having been another big, blond, ruddy-faced guy of his height and build on the twenty-first floor the previous night, I couldn’t estimate. Million to one wouldn’t have been far off.

Of course, if he’d been with Edie’s cream puffs all the time after leaving the hotel until his Lady Godiva performance on Park Avenue, he couldn’t very well have been the lad who trailed me from Manhasset. Or shot up my bus on Atlantic Avenue.

But there were too many things, besides that key I’d taken from Edie, that he wasn’t able to clear up. Or willing to.

When we left the Gotham, he turned to me in despair.

“Now what the hell am I going to do? I haven’t any clothes or any money! I can’t get in Walch’s room if he’s not in town! I can’t go back home without any luggage!”

I told him the first thing he needed was to get cleaned up, sobered up. I knew the place, if he’d agree to stay there until I decided it was okay.

He had some friends in town, plenty more in Philly, but he didn’t want to let any of them know about his fix, for fear it would get back to his wife. So he agreed.

In five minutes we were at Pud Hoffman’s Finnish Baths. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to farm out a jitter case to Pud; we had a routine established. Take away every stitch of the patient’s clothing. Stick him in the steam room until he was so weak he couldn’t get away without crutches. Let him sleep.

While Yaker was undressing I inquired about the wax spots on his spread. Either he was completely in the dark about them or else he was a more cagey customer than I rated him.

I told him what I thought the wax had been used for; to cover fingerprints so a murderer couldn’t be traced. That threw him. He hadn’t known about any murder. Hadn’t ever been in 21MM at all. Knew Tildy Millett by sight and by name, but had never met her.

Just before Pud shoved him in the steam room I mentioned Lanerd’s death. Yaker got so sick to his stomach I thought he was having convulsions. Pud thought he’d wilt if that heat hit him then; we put him in bed. He fell into a heavy sleep of nervous exhaustion without a twitch.

It’s easy to fake a faint. Something else again to artificially induce an abdominal reaction like that. If the big lunk lying so limply on Pud’s cot had sliced one man and blown another’s brains out, Snow White was Baby Face Nelson in disguise.

I called Tim. He was in shape for a strait jacket, trying to hold the wheel in my absence. If I would just hike back in a hurry, probably it could all be smoothed over with the front office. The lab boys had definitely determined Lanerd had suicided. The flare test showed powder traces on his right hand. His prints were on the laundry hamper too. And had I heard, that coat, the cream-colored dilly with the chocolate checks?

“Whose was it? Reidy’s?”

“Ha, ha.” A hollow chuckle. “Zingy traced it. Through the valet. It’s Lanerd’s. Matter of fact it was hangin’ up in his closet when this Schneider looks for it.”

“So they think it’s open and shut?”

“There were bloodstains on the coat, Chief. Jeeze, what more you want?”

“I don’t know, Tim.” I didn’t. “Fran, maybe. She in?”

“I let her off until midnight. She was on eighteen hours yesterday.”

“Yair. ’S right. Any info about T.M.?”

“Hacklin’s had word from her agent. He put her on board Lanerd’s yacht where she’ll be safe from this Gowriss until she has to testify before the Grand Jury tomorrow. Still, the reporters won’t be able to pester her.”

“‘Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine.’”

“Huh?”

“A quote of no significance, Tim.”

“Lissen, Chief. You haven’t still got that bee in y’r bonnet about Lanerd’s havin’ been murdered!”

“Yair. I have. And it’s going to sting somebody yet.” I told him what I had in mind. What Lanerd had told Hacklin on the phone just before he died.

At LaGuardia the next plane for Cincinnati was at nine peeyem. That left time for a leisurely session at the airport barbershop. While I waited for the white chair, I skimmed the early edition of our most sedate journal. They’d page-oned it: Dow Lanerd Found Dead in Hotel Suite.

The copy desk had cut conjecture to the bone. The facts were accurate, far as they went. The famed Mr. Giveaway, promoter and developer of many leading radio and television programs had been discovered lying on the floor of a bathroom in his suite at the Plaza Royale, Fifth Avenue home of many socially prominent. He had been shot in the right temple by his own automatic pistol; preliminary police reports indicated the president of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright, internationally influential advertising agents, had shot himself.