Stewart Sterling - Dead of Night

When the commotion had subsided and the cuffs were on Walch, Schneider returned to hectoring me. “What’s the idea, Smart Stuff? Makin’ like this dummy was the murderer?” He thumbed a thumb at a still hiccuping Yaker.

“Everything I said was on the up and up about Walch. He managed it the way I said. He did have the strongest reasons for wanting Lanerd out of the way. He’d lose his principal piece of talent; Miss Millett wouldn’t have stayed in show biz long. Probably her reason for wanting to be married was so she could have children?” I asked it indirectly.

Nikky answered tartly, “Anything wrong with that?”

“Nothing at all,” I said. “I’m in favor of it. Mentioned it to show why Walch didn’t mind her having an affair, but was willing to murder to keep her from marrying. Even that wasn’t the main motive that powered him into murder.”

Hacklin’s turn. “What was?”

I glanced at Tildy.

“No.” She seized my arm, pleading.

Marge urged me to leave her alone.

Nikky joined in. “Isn’t it terrible enough?”

I opened Walch’s wallet. “I’d say not. We have to put Walch where he can’t do any more damage.” I took out the snapshot of the kid in the polar-bear suit. “Who’s this, Miss Millett?”

She shook her head, weeping.

“Her son.” I handed the snap to Hacklin. “Saw Tony down in Kentucky. Swell youngster. Even if he does look a little like his father, there.”

Walch was doubled over in pain, didn’t retort. Tildy stopped crying.

“How’d you find out?”

“When I was over at the Icequadrille rehearsal yesterday, I happened to see this picture. So I recognized the boy soon’s I saw him down in Lexington. He resembles you more than he does your sister, too. Seemed funny Walch’d have the boy’s photograph in his wallet — and yet none of the mother, who’s his main source of income. Thought it was queer, too, that Walch hadn’t been in your suite at the hotel more. Why he hadn’t gone to the Stack O’ Jack show with you. Agent getting ten percent of your salary ought to have been around to smooth things out for you.”

MacGregory grunted, “I’d wondered about that, myself. Even in spite of Nikky’s crack about his making Tildy nervous.”

“The principal thing” — I watched Hacklin and Schneider trying to find likenesses between Tony’s picture and the man in manacles; there weren’t too many; he really resembled Tildy more than Walch — “was the emphasis on Lexington. That farewell note Miss Millett sent to Lanerd — it said she couldn’t elope with him because of ‘the way things are.’ Since she’d been doing a lot of long-distancing to Lexington, and Lanerd told Hacklin she might be on her way there, I thought probably it might be the way things were, down in Kentucky, which caused her to change her mind about eloping.”

Nikky snapped, “So you had to hound her all the way to Kentucky, even when she wasn’t there!”

“Wouldn’t have had to, if I could’ve doped out the cryptic note someone, I presumed it was the murderer, sent her right after Roffis was found dead. The note was signed ‘Lx’ or Lexington. Miss Moore thought Lanerd had sent it. Actually Walch wrote it in Lanerd’s suite after murdering the guard.”

Hacklin stuck fists on hips. “You didn’t show us any note!”

“Always respect the confidence of the guest, golden rule of the business.” I appealed to Tildy. “‘Seven for a secret’ — what was that?”

She looked away. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“No. Well. ‘Never forget four’ was the one I made a blind guess at. When Fran Lane stayed with you at the Brulard Saturday night, she heard you mumbling in your sleep, ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth.’ Sounded to me like a toast, one sup of the cup for each. Only thing I could work out was ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for da-da, four for—’ only thing anyone would be likely to want to drink to, which rhymes with mirth—”

“Birth,” said Doctor Elm softly. “It’s an Olde English Pub motto; how does it go, now?

“Four was as much as I could wrangle,” I said. “Of course, I wasn’t sure about that. But if there’d been a birth which might have stood in Lanerd’s way, question was — whose child? And — had there been a wedding and a divorce? Or neither?”

Marge went to Tildy, put her arms around her. Nikky, too, came hotly to the skater’s defense. “There was a wedding. But that pig,” she stared hatred at the doubled-up agent, “told her he’d been divorced from his first wife and he hadn’t. So Tony — well—”

“Yair. And though Walch didn’t have any legal right to the boy, he could hold illegitimacy over Miss Millett whenever he felt like it, could publicly claim fatherhood, mess things up for everybody. Might even sue to take the boy away from her. Emotional blackmail.” It wasn’t necessary to make Tildy admit she’d covered up for Walch, by accusing Yaker, and Nikky’d done the same by throwing the blame on Lanerd, because Tildy couldn’t bear to have her boy grow up to realize his father was a killer. “The blackmail slant was one of the first things I thought about, only in a different way.”

Ruth wanted to know what I meant.

“Walch was an old hand at traveling around the country. He’d have been used to stopping at good hotels. He knew the rules, what he could get away with — and couldn’t. Made me wonder, the first time I saw him with La Eberlein, why he was making a bluff at sneaking con girls into the Plaza Royale.”

Walch raised his head. “You lousy keyholer!”

I said, “You knew you couldn’t run those cuties into our hotel. Must’ve had a reason for wanting someone to think it might work, when it wouldn’t. Expect you meant to get the madam up in Lanerd’s suite just long enough to throw suspicion on her for the murder you were going to commit. She knew Gowriss’s friends down at the Blue Blazer. She hung around there all the time. It would have been easy for the D.A. to assume she’d been paid to put Lanerd out of circulation, since he’d been in the café at the time of the shooting, too. And might have seen Gowriss, himself. She was a good decoy. The more notice we took of her, the better.”

He came for me, lunging with the handcuffs.

I let Schneider take him.

The curvaceous statuette was on the ornamental table in the foyer of Ruth’s apartment when we went in. I stroked it gently.

“Nearly gave me amnesia, me proud beauty.”

Ruth fluffed her hair in front of the mirror. “What I can’t understand, why’d Keith Walch sneak in here yesterday? He couldn’t have known you were coming.”

“No.” I followed her into the kitchenette, helped with the ice cubes. “Matter of keys. Keys were the crux of it.”

“Probably make something of that if you worked at it. Crux — who stole keys.”

“I’ll take it up, next board meeting.” I told her how I figured it. “Keep in mind that Lanerd knew it was Walch who busted into the Millett suite wearing Dow’s jacket. Tildy’d have told him; they’d have talked about Walch plenty before then; her reference to calling off the elopement because of ‘the way things stood’ showed that. Whether, before she left for the studio with Hacklin, she knew or guessed that Roffis had been killed and heaved in her closet, that’s beside the point. Point is, Lanerd knew Walch was after him. That’s why he had his gun at ready when I came in the suite.”