Lina took the letter and stared at it. Something was wrong. Instead of lulling her suspicions, the letter seemed to have sharpened them still more. She looked up, fixing her gaze on my face.
“It ees not finished, thees letter.”
I hadn’t thought about that. “No.”
“Why?”
I couldn’t tell her that Eulalia had been murdered before she finished the letter. I could not risk having her run out into the street for the nearest policeman. I said: “Eulalia just wanted you to see some of her handwriting so that you would know you could trust me.”
“I see.” She added sharply: “And Eulalia ees at the St. Anton Hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Why is she there when she has an apartment that ees her own?”
That stopped me for a moment. “Because—because she thinks it’s safer at a hotel.”
“I see.”
Slowly, step by step, she began to back away from me towards the door.
“You do trust me, don’t you, Lina? I’ve come here to help you.”
“Yes, yes. You help me.” She was still moving backwards, watching me as if I were a poisonous snake.
“You’re not afraid of me?”
“Why should I be? I expect you. I get your message. They bring it from the drugstore just before they close.”
“My message! But…” I stopped myself in time.
Lina had reached the door. The terror in her eyes was quite out of control now. She gave a wild smile.
“My glasses!” she faltered. “To read thees letter from Eulalia, I must get my glasses from bedroom. One moment, pliz.”
With that, she ducked out of the room, closing the door behind her.
My pulses were pounding. I get your message. I expect you. That’s what she had said. I saw then exactly what was happening. Eulalia’s death had been foreshadowed by a telephone message from “Lieutenant Duluth.” And now Lina, though she had no telephone, had received a similar message from “Lieutenant Duluth”—sent over from the drugstore across the street. The man with the lisp had called to say he was coming from Eulalia, and Lina had trusted the message. And the ironical part was that she had let me in simply because she thought I was the “Lieutenant Duluth” who had called.
The whole murder pattern was being played out again.
Only this time, thanks to Cecil Grey and a kindly providence, I had arrived in time.
My first impulse was to follow Lina into the bedroom to warn her that at that very moment the roses, whatever they were, were on their way to murder her. I took a step to the door. Then I stopped. Lina was frightened enough already. If I suddenly appeared in the bedroom with news like that, she might well tilt over into panic and run out for police help. The front door was safely locked and chained. So long as we were both inside the apartment, nothing could happen to her. And if I played my cards right, I might be able to catch Eulalia’s murderer myself. So far as my own anomalous position was concerned, that would be worth a thousand drunken Beards.
The thing to do was to wait, to be ready for anything and smart enough to cope with whatever anything showed up. Hatch hadn’t much faith in my tact. To him I was a bull in a china shop. This was one moment when the china shop could do with a good bull.
I felt almost elated.
To keep myself occupied while Lina was gone, I started to stroll around the parlor. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of a cheerful young man in an army sergeant’s uniform. Scrawled in the corner was the message:
Till I come home,
love,
Ollie.
So Sergeant Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown was off a-soldiering.
A book with a blue cover lay on the arm of an overstuffed chair as if Lina had recently been reading it. I picked it up and glanced idly at its title: Crimes of Our Times, edited by John L. Weatherby. I opened it at random to a learned essay on the Hall-Mills case. A study of true murders seemed a strange sedative for Lina’s fear-jangled nerves. I started to turn the pages, then I let the book drop back on the chair because I saw another photograph on a table by the chair.
At first as I looked at that photograph, I hardly believed my eyes. And yet there was no mistaking that friendly blonde face with its beaming smile.
Staring out of a silver frame in the parlor of Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown was the likeness of Mrs. Rose—the woman who had given up her room to Iris and me at the St. Anton that afternoon.
As I gazed at it, making no sort of sense of it, I was dimly conscious of the throb of an approaching automobile in the lonely silence outside. Mrs. Rose. Everything else that had happened to us in Frisco had managed to link up with this insane intrigue, but I had never thought seriously of Mrs. Rose’s being implicated, too. I remembered our benefactress’s bobbing feather-duster hat and her bursts of laughter. That laughter had sounded as innocent as a gusty breeze from the sea.
It didn’t sound innocent any more.
The automobile had stopped somewhere quite close outside. There was no sound of Lina’s return from the bedroom. That beaming photograph of Mrs. Rose was tantalizing, exasperating. I started to get worried about Lina. Why should it take her so long to find her glasses?
I went to the door to the hall which stood cater-cornered from the barred window facing out to the street. After a moment’s hesitation, my hand moved to the door-knob. I turned it. Nothing happened. I turned again. It was only too clear what Lina had done.
She had locked me in the parlor.
As I stood staring at the door, I saw at once what must have gone on in her mind. She had let me in because she thought I was the “Lieutenant Duluth” who had telephoned, but my lack of uniform, coupled with my blundering remarks, had made her suspicious. Her increasingly sharp questions had indicated that. Finally the fact that Eulalia’s letter was unfinished and my limp reason for her being at the St Anton had sunk the scales against me.
Lina had locked me in here because she had decided that I was merely impersonating the genuine Lieutenant Duluth, and that I was either one of her floral enemies or their agent commissioned to lure her to their headquarters.
I couldn’t think about the irony of it. I was too worried. Lina thought she had locked her potential murderer in the parlor, while I was in fact her friend and, if I was right, the man with a lisp, masquerading as me, was going to put in his deadly appearance at any minute.
I shook the handle of the parlor door. As I did so, I heard a sound that stirred the hairs at the back of my neck. Someone was coming, softly and swiftly, down the iron stairway from the street. Surely, Lina would be receiving no ordinary callers at this hour of the night.
Had it happened even more quickly than I had expected?
Was “Lieutenant Duluth” already arriving?
I stood quite still, without moving a muscle, remembering the car that had just stopped outside. The footsteps paused at the front door. There was a brief moment of silence. Then the urgent shrill of the buzzer rang through the apartment.
I started to beat with my fists on the locked parlor door. Outside the passage, I heard Lina’s footsteps hurrying from the bedroom.
I shouted: “Don’t let him in, Lina. For God’s sake, don’t let him in.”
The buzzer sounded again. Lina’s footsteps tapped steadily on towards the front door.
“Lina, don’t let him in.”
But, even as I called, I realized that nothing I said would affect her. I was the villain of the piece. She was running from me to the unknown man outside the door, who, to her, was her savior.
Desperate, I took a lunge at the parlor door, crashing my shoulders against it. The wood was heavy and old. The door shivered and stood firm.
I heard the safety chain on the front door slide out of its socket and Lina’s voice crying: “Lieutenant Duluth, it ees you? You have come at last? Queeck. Queeck. I have him locked. A man from the roses. A man who pretends to be you.”
“Lina!” I shouted hopelessly. “Don’t let him
in. They killed Eulalia. They’ll kill you.”
My words, muffled in that lonely basement, sounded futile and hollow. I threw myself at the door again. Once again it shivered and held its ground.
From the hall I heard a creak as Lina swung the front door open.
“Queeck …” Her voice sounded high with excitement. Then at what must have been the instant when she actually saw the man on the threshold, her voice toppled into a reedy cry. “You!…”
A man’s voice replied, soft, husky.
“Yes, Lina, it’s me.”
I heard that yes and that it’s clearly enough to know that this new arrival did not lisp. I felt a sudden kindling hope.
There was silence. Then, out of the silence came a small wail that turned into a hissing sigh. A sigh—and a subdued noise as of a little body crumpling to the floor.
I hurled myself a third time against the door. The lock gave a wrenching groan but did not yield. And, as I paused, panting, I heard the front door slam shut and footsteps clatter away again up the iron stairs to the street.
The window was close at my side. Its top was at street level and the area between it and the street was narrow that the light from the room illuminated the strip of sidewalk like a theater spotlight. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of something moving past the window. I swung round. A pair of legs, visible only halfway up the calf, were speeding past. They were so near that, had the window been open, I could have reached through the bars and touched them.
Those legs were wearing a pair of naval lieutenant’s trousers. And in the brief second before they passed from my vision, I distinctly saw low down on the left leg a small triangular tear.
That man, who had come and who had not lisped, was wearing my stolen uniform.
Recklessly I threw myself again and again at the door. Farther up the street, I heard a car start with a grinding of gears and roar away. A last, vicious attack split the door from the lock and sent it swinging open.
My shoulder raw and smarting, I dashed out into the hall. I knew what I was going to see, knew it with such nightmare certainty that I hardly had the courage to look.
Light splayed out through the broken parlor door behind me. It filtered across the dark hall towards the closed front door.
Lina lay there on her back, the pink satin robe foaming loose around her. The wooden handle of a cheap knife reared up from the pink nightgown under the left breast. And there was blood—crimson blood pulsing up and spilling over the pink material.
But the blood wasn’t the worst part. The flowers which I had vaguely noticed on the hall table had been spilled out of the vase. They were strewn haphazard over that prostrate little body.
They were roses, of course. But this time, they were not red. They were white—dozens of pure white roses.
I ran to Lina. I knelt at her side. I felt her wrist for the pulse that was not there.
The scent of the roses wafted to me. Lina’s big black eyes looked up, quite stupid, set in a glazed stare of terror. Her tiny wrist, under my shaking fingers, was warm.
But she was dead. I had seen enough dead people in the Pacific to be sure of that.
I stayed crouching there. What had been my plan? To save Lina and to catch Eulalia’s murderer red-handed. I felt weary, spent, and utterly useless.
The red rose and the white rose mean blood.
They meant blood, all right.
CHAPTER IX
I squatted in that drab hallway beside the dead body of Lina Brown. The scent from the white roses gave the atmosphere the nauseous sweetness of a funeral parlor.
Red roses for Eulalia. White roses for Lina. A murderer with a lisp for Eulalia. A murderer without a lisp for Lina. So there were two murderers at least. And both of them had worn my uniform.
My thoughts blundered on. Surely, no mission had ever met with such dismal failure. I had been unable to prevent Lina from running straight into the arms of death. I had let her be murdered with only the thickness of a door between me and her murderer. The drugstore would remember “Lieutenant Duluth’s” message. When Lina was found, “Lieutenant Duluth” would be the first name the police would hear. And this time I had no sort of alibi, for I had actually been on the scene of the crime. I had fallen into a second trap far more deadly than the one set for me at Eulalia’s apartment.
With a mixture of indignation and despair, I saw that Lina’s murder dealt me another body blow. Lina had known the secret of the roses. Apart from the Beard, she was the only person who, by telling the truth, could have convinced the police that I was not a psychopathic liar. Now she was dead, and there was nothing but that crafty drunken old man between me and—the deluge.
While those reflections spun in my head, my body had been instinctively on the alert for any sound from the apartment above or the street outside to warn me that my battle with the door or Lina’s wailing cry had aroused the neighborhood. As the seconds ticked by nothing disturbed the silence of the night. I was getting one break, it seemed. Having failed to catch the murderer red-handed, I was at least going to be spared the discomfort of being caught red-handed myself.
As I crouched there, I became conscious of something I hadn’t noticed before. Lina’s right hand was half covered by the tangled folds of her bathrobe. But something was clutched in it. The edge of a piece of paper was just visible, poking out from the pink satin. Eulalia’s letter, of course. I shivered to think what might happen if it was found there.
I eased it from the dead grip of the fingers. I smoothed it out before folding it and, as I did so, my eye fell on one particular line:
There’s danger, Lina, terrible, terrible danger for all of us.
For all of us! That phrase burned through me like a flame through paper. Why hadn’t Hatch or Iris or I noticed that “all of us” before? It could mean only one thing. It meant that Eulalia and Lina were not the only two in danger. There were still others, men or women, who were marked for death by this impossible rose and crocus team.
I was almost at the end of my tether then. Was an infinite succession of Lieutenant Duluths going to prowl murderously through the streets of San Francisco? Was this thing never going to end?
And, as if things weren’t bad enough, another thought came. Before Lina’s death my position had been embarrassing enough, but there was always the comforting thought that the witnessed theft of my uniform at the Turkish bath was something definite and provable to back up my story. But now that I was so much more deeply involved, I realized with alarming clarity that even this prop could be pushed from under me. What if the police thought I had staged the whole uniform theft episode as a very elaborate dust-throwing act? The dozing door clerk had not noticed me come in as a lieutenant. I could easily have arrived at the bath as a civilian and complained of the loss of a perfectly imaginary uniform.
If the police did think that, nothing human or inhuman could stop them from arresting me as a crafty and maniacal double murderer.
I was really on the spot now.
I stood up, putting Eulalia’s letter into my breast pocket. I managed to steady myself. It wasn’t easy. The Beard had known about Lina. All right. The Beard would know about these other people. I hadn’t put my hand to this plow. I’d had my hand chained to it. The time for turning back was long since past.
I looked down at Lina. I was getting used to thinking like a criminal. Cynically I reflected that she had been living alone as a war wife. That meant there was a good chance that she, like Eulalia, would not be found at least until morning. I would have to walk out on her, of course. There had never been any question about that. But with luck we still had a certain amount of time.
Perhaps, when I returned to the hotel, Iris would already be in Room 624, and the Beard would have told all. Perhaps I would still be able to get to the police with some halfway plausible story before the murders were discovered.
Perhaps.
I threw a last glance down at Lina, poor little Lina whose caution had kill
ed her. She looked as limp and unreal as one of Eulalia’s puppets. Sorry as I was for myself, I felt sorrier for her. That was a bad way to die, alone, with a knife in her heart and no Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown to comfort her.
I opened the front door. I peered up into the darkness of the street. There was no sound of human stirring. I closed the door behind me. I tiptoed up the iron stairs on to the deserted sidewalk.
I was a fugitive from two murders now.
I walked the few desolate blocks to the zoo terminal of the trolley line. All my worse moments were associated with trolleys. I would never be able to face one again with equanimity. An empty car was waiting at the end of the tracks, less than a hundred yards from the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I was the sole passenger at first, and by the time the car bolted forward I had only two sleepy soldiers as travelling companions.
At least my exit from Wawona Avenue had been inconspicuous.
But as the trolley rattled along its interminable journey to the center of the city, I began to feel the delayed effects of shock. Lina’s big black eyes and her fluttering hands haunted me. The colossal failure of my expedition plagued me. The beaming face of Mrs. Rose, sinister now, swam through my mind.
Mrs. Rose … The roses. My thoughts stuck there. Over and over again, they churned out that meaningless jingle.
The red rose … the white rose … the. crocus … the red rose … the white rose … the crocus …
It was exactly a quarter to three when I reached the St. Anton. Before I went in, I paused outside the Geary entrance where Cecil Grey had accosted me, trying to make a plan. If my wife had been successful, she should have been able to lure the Beard back to our room by now. Even if she hadn’t returned, I didn’t dare ask for the room key in my guilty civilian suit. My safest move was to sneak up the stairs to the sixth floor and, if Iris wasn’t in the room, to wait outside in the corridor.
Puzzle for Puppets Page 9