E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Meraux was saying, “What? It went out an hour ago! But where is it? Where is it? Can one lose a trunk that size?”

  An African voice filtered past Meraux’s ear: “But I done sent it, suh. Ah done had Po’ter Numbah Twenty-fo’ take it up to Miss Dalli’s suite. Ah really did, suh—”

  “Let me talk to Number Twenty-four!”

  “Can’t find him, suh. Ah been looking—”

  Wham!

  Meraux’s teeth grated. He turned on Cragin. “Now I am convinced. Voodoo—zombies—something has run off with it—gremlins—” He saw Pilar standing there. “Tell her I’m calling in magicians, tell her to wear something else, tell her—”

  But Pilar was not telling anyone. She flashed a glance at the door of Nedra’s bedroom and dressing room. “I am waiting here, you onnerstan’? Right here!”

  Cragin offered her a pack of Camels. She sank into a chair, stretched out her sleek legs, and closed her eyes; it was plain from the way she dragged at the smoke that she was just about worn out. Cragin began thinking, “Nedra’s not what she used to be. And talk about talking myself into something!”

  Hollywood drove people nuts. High pressure led to raising hell about ouangas, screaming about a missing gown, driving her maid batty. She had to blow her top in private to be able to put something behind that smile in public.

  She could not fake that kind of smile. It was more than a matter of twisting facial muscles until so much of so many teeth showed. She put so much of herself into it that, there, was nothing left to hold her together between appearances; and there had been too many appearances, too many war bond drives, too much of everything.

  This was becoming all too clear to Cragin. Look what Tunisia had made him say to rehabilitation; now that he’d cooled off, he could not quite see why he was not in the guardhouse.

  Then he heard a laugh, the kind which makes attendants in a psychopathic ward finally say, “They’re not nuts, I am; lock me up, Doctor, and put black lace and little rosebuds on my straitjacket!”

  The laugh came from Nedra’s dressing room. She finally became coherent enough to say, “Oh, Frosty—”

  Meaning Forsythe.

  “You look so funny, always playing games! Hiding in that trunk, and then hiding the trunk.”

  Meraux jerked to his feet. He took three steps toward the door, then he turned on Pilar, who was wide-eyed and gaping. He caught her arm, then let go, then stopped again. Cragin said, “Call a doctor, you fool, she’s blown her top!”

  “And doubtless I am not blowing the top myself?” Meraux fairly screamed. “Listen to her! Do you hear?”

  The three made a lunge for the door. They jammed up at the threshold. Cragin got an armful of Pilar, and a mouthful of her dark hair, and then a look over her head. She was shoulder high and shapely.

  A wardrobe trunk, swung open book-like, had spewed out a dark-haired man who wore blue worsteds with a fine brown stripe. His shirt front had red on it, but not a pattern: just an ugly splash. Dark red foam trickled from his mouth; just enough to give the horrible suggestion of a tragic mask superimposed on a lean, good-looking face, the face that Cragin might have altered substantially, a few days previous, but for general intervention.

  The man was Forsythe Burnett, no longer interested in playing Jean Lafitte. As for Nedra, she had an automatic with a smooth ivory grip. She still knelt, and still shook Burnett’s shoulder. She looked up, dazed, at the three in the doorway. She rose, slowly, woodenly. The pistol dropped from her fingers, and a thin, dry smack followed.

  The automatic threw a slug into the plaster.

  The report, and the three-fold yell, and the rush of feet snapped her out of the stupid stare which had made a caricature of her face.

  “My God—I shot him—”

  “Shut up!” Meraux cried, voice cracking. Then, “Put him back, get him out of here, one word from you—”

  Cragin shook him. “Steady, Ash-heel! This is out of hand, and plenty.” He caught Nedra by the arms, but when she clung to him in an hysterical outburst, Cragin said to Pilar, “Take over, baby; this beats me. Achille, dig up a drink, we all need one.”

  Nedra pulled herself together faster than Cragin had believed possible. She was coherent by the time Meraux returned with a decanter.

  “The trunk finally, at long, long last, came up while Pilar was busy—”

  “Trying to get Burnett or Sinclair?”

  “Yes. And I opened it myself, just impatient. And—but I didn’t shoot him, Lord, how could I have?”

  “Trunk came in through the side door?” Cragin asked, gesturing. Then, at Nedra’s nod, “Burnett could’ve done the same, only—”

  Meraux leaped up, fury choking his words. Cragin shushed him. “Pipe down! I intended to say, “Only what’s happened to the guts of the left wing of the trunk? All gone to make room for him. That lets her out, and we could’ve heard even that pea-shooter through the door panel.”

  Meraux however was looking as though he faced a murder rap. “It is just as bad as if she really had shot him!” he cried. “The scandal. Those damned columnists!”

  Cragin’s face lengthened. “Honey, were you fixing to marry Burnett?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “They all were saying you were.”

  “Columnist gossip,” she cut in wearily. “I’m bound to be linked with someone, you know, and we were seen around together a lot.”

  “So they’ll have suicide rumors,” Cragin muttered.

  The jab of a hot iron could hardly have produced a more agonized groan from her manager. Cragin carried on, “Look here, you can unlax, pal; how’s a guy going to get into a trunk and lock himself in and shoot himself?”

  “It’s not impossible,” Meraux declared, “and these newspaper fools can make more of a rumor than of a fact. Fiancé dramatically delivers own corpse to woman who spurned him, do you comprehend? Or words to that effect!”

  Cragin sighed and tried to brush back his hair, but succeeded only in mussing it some more. “Pilar, you better see the house dick, don’t phone, see him, make him get in touch with Harry Ormond. Mr. Ormond’s the manager. If anyone did hear that pipsqueak shot, admit nothing. Get it?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Nedra had a corner suite. Next to it was the late Forsythe Burnett’s sitting room and bedroom which, because of the wartime congestion, he had to share with Dayles Sinclair. Since neither was co-starred with Nedra, neither could claim that his dignity and prestige had been badly affronted, though as Cragin saw things, Burnett might well have felt put upon.

  Cragin said to Nedra, as the outer door closed, “You were alone when you opened it?”

  “Yes. Pilar was out when it arrived; she’d scarcely left when one of the chief porter’s crew brought it in. I was too mad even to read him the riot act, and he saw I was, and he dashed out before I could as much as get my breath; you know how colored people are, about ducking trouble. Well, when Pilar did come in, I hustled her right out—”

  “And she came in the front door,” Cragin said, and getting Meraux’ nod of approval, went on, “And you must’ve been on a high lonesome; she was scared to go back in; she stalled around a few minutes with us, and then things blew up.”

  Then the hall door opened, and a man demanded, “So you’re the dick, huh?”

  Cragin turned, eyed the big, heavy-faced man who stalked in as though he owned the place. “Oh, hello, Mason.”

  Mason squinted. “Hi, Cragin. What’s happened to the war? Sorry you’re back.” He grinned as he said it. “What’s this the Latin lovely tells me, someone—uh—hurt—hell’s bells! I’ll say he’s hurt!” Mason was an ex-cop. He didn’t even have to squat to see that Burnett was a dead duck. “Who done it?”

  Cragin chuckled sourly. “While you and the Homicide Squad take that over, I’ll be getting the answers. Happy days agai
n.”

  “I’d like to frisk you for concealed evidence,” Mason said, after a snort. “Why didn’t you try stuffing him in a broom closet or elevator shaft? You used to be good.”

  “Arm gives a fellow new ethics!” Leroux, the house doctor, who trailed in after Mason, figured that Burnett must have been dead for half an hour. That completely let Nedra out of the rap, but not out of the nasty implications arising from having a blacked-out suitor, suicide or murder victim, dumped at her feet.

  From then on, it was routine. For the time, Warren, the assistant manager, contrived to keep things sweet and low. Meraux and the movie executives teamed up and succeeded in muzzling the newspaper crowd to the extent of keeping the story out of the first extras. And the morning regular edition was to be vague on all but the actual death by gunshot wounds. Beyond that limit, it would be open season on Nedra.

  Cragin wasn’t searched for concealed evidence. The gun, and the chewed plaster, and the corpse, all combined, to throw the cops off guard. They did not know that he had snatched not only the waxen ouanga, but also, the notes which warned Nedra against going on with “Pirates of Barataria.”

  There were two ouangas: the effigy of Nedra, and the one which had come packed with the corpse. This last represented Forsythe Burnett. It was skewered by a large pin, right in the chest, corresponding precisely to the point where pistol slugs had drilled the actor.

  Voodoo means vengeance. Or jealousy. Especially jealousy. Whether a suitor who had never gotten to first base, or one who had been discarded, Cragin could not guess, for he had seen little enough of Nedra these past three-four years; but he was certain that one or the other stood behind the voodoo trimmings.

  “The Chinese,” he concluded in his solo summing up, “commit suicide to spite someone. But there’s nothing Chinese behind this.”

  He was almost ready to add, “And nothing African either!”

  The trimmings were all phony.

  CHAPTER IV

  Voodoo Was Not Discussed

  Nedra’s own automatic had settled Forsythe Burnett. The weapon, she said, had fallen into view when the corpse lurched out of the trunk. And while this did not incriminate her, the implications were nasty. Cragin said, “The missing guts of the trunk—that’s something to find, that’ll pull it away from you.”

  “How, Cliff?”

  “By showing that the trick was pulled anywhere but here, or in his suite.”

  And then Harry Ormond barged in. He managed the hotel, and he also owned a controlling interest: inherited, along with a grade-A palace way up St. Charles Avenue. But now Ormond’s legacy was pure grief; his thin face and worried eyes made that plain. He looked already as though he’d lost several nights’ much needed sleep.

  “Nedra, this is terrible,” Barely acknowledging Cragin’s presence, he plopped himself into a chair. “I’m afraid it’s going to hurt your career—and to think it happened—in my house. I’ll see if I can find rooms for you at the—”

  “Harry, I wouldn’t dream of leaving, not if you found me an entire floor elsewhere! I’m staying here. For old times’ sake.”

  Ormond’s misery and embarrassment seemed to pull Nedra together. Cragin was startled by the suddenness of the change, and decided to make the most of it: “You’ve got an engagement, and it’d do you a lot of good to get out of these rooms. What’s more, make your appearance, plenty of appearances, before the papers get their play. It’d help.”

  Meraux sat up. “Sure she must go! Wear something. Anything.”

  Then a porter came in with a trunk. Pilar got her list, and suggested substitutes for the gowns which had been in Number Five. She had hardly settled down to getting the one Nedra found acceptable when she exclaimed,. “Look! Here’s the one that should have been in Five.”

  An odd touch, that careful transfer of garments.

  Cragin picked up his hat. “See you when the shindig is over.”

  “Oh, Cliff, aren’t you joining us? I expected you to.”

  “Uh-uh. I got other things to tend to. And you’re not in any danger, not you.”

  Ormond snapped up, indignantly rather than incredulously. “You idiot, how do you know she’s not?”

  “Whoever gutted her trunk was careful to pack that special dress so it wouldn’t be crushed or even wrinkled.” Cragin caught Meraux’s eye for an instant, and then said to Nedra, “Maybe later. Right now, you need me somewhere else.”

  Meraux rose, saying, “You have to hurry and dress. First cocktails at the Delta Club, then at—”

  “She knows the schedule,” Cragin interrupted, and hustled Meraux to his own room, where he demanded, “Give me the dirt on Burnett.”

  The Frenchman shrugged. “He was dizzy about her. Who wasn’t?”

  “I mean, did he really believe she was going to marry him? Or was he just hoping?”

  “Am I a mind reader? Does he whisper all that into my ear? Why not ask Dayles Sinclair? He’d know better.”

  “Are they buddies or are they feuding? Two good looking guys wouldn’t have much use for each other. Or would they?”

  Meraux sighed. “That girl is enough problem. When it is not a missing trunk, it is something else, would I have time to ask the boys about their souls! Even that Ormond is still gaga about her!”

  So Cragin let it go at that. He crossed the hall, and tapped at the suite which Dayles Sinclair and Forsythe Burnett had shared. There was no answer. He had expected this, judging from the bar to bar search, made by telephone, that afternoon.

  Cragin put pressure on the floor clerk: his credentials, plus five bucks, plus his previous entree to the sacred corridor helped stretch the rules and win admittance. “Now beat it,” he said, “and give me a buzz in case someone pops up. I’ll head for the fire escape, and the rest is my business.”

  “You better hurry, he’s been out all afternoon, and he may be back any time.”

  “You can see everything from your desk? Everything going down this corridor?”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Yeah, when you’re looking this way.” The clerk, a new employee, seemed not to know about the emergency stairway, nor the freight elevator, neither of which were in his line of sight.

  Closing the door behind him, Cragin stood there, looking over the sitting room, and into the bedrooms beyond. What first caught his eye was the dark stain on the taupe broadloom carpet.

  It was almost dry. It had the peculiar stickiness of coagulated blood. There was not much of it: just a small pool, smeared as though a straight-edged object had dragged it for a little way across the nape of the carpet. He hurried to the bath. There were soiled towels, but none had bloodstains.

  “Whatever happened, it wasn’t done while shaving,” he decided.

  Already, just as a guess, a pure guess although plausible one, this was where Burnett had been knocked off with a small caliber automatic; the sounds of Royal Street, surging up from the congested narrowness, would drown the thin whack of a .25.

  He set to work frisking dressers and chifforobes and luggage, but found no threatening notes, nor any ouangas. There was nothing to give any evidence of marked personality or temperament; as Cragin saw it, the occupants, like many of their kind, were a succession of borrowed personalities, plastic for any director to shape as he pleased.

  Of the two rooms, Burnett’s was readily picked; there was a photo, silver framed, and autographed by Nedra: “Dear Frosty, remember happy days.” Cragin snorted. “Just like the one she sent me. Oh, well!”

  Sinclair’s room was no more revealing than Burnett’s. Cragin was about to call the job finished when, picking up the shoes on the closet floor, he noted the dark red stains on the white buck insets of a sport model.

  “Left foot—”

  Then he shook his head. It was ketchup. There were bits of sawdust adhering to the sole, near the heel. He sn
iffed and said, “Oyster bar.” A scale of crayfish armor clinched it. Wherever he was, whatever he had done, Dayles Sinclair had recently stood at a counter, right foot cocked on the rail, left foot planted where ketchup could drip.

  Making the rounds of the seafood places would be a real chore, but it might be worthwhile.

  Cragin lifted the receiver, and heard the floor clerk answer, “All clear, sir.”

  He stepped into the hall, and headed for the baggage room, whose floor was somewhat below the level of the alley on which it fronted. A loading dock, the height of a truck bed, crossed the entrance. Cragin, looking into the murkily lighted room, saw a white-haired Negro who laboriously scrawled entries in a delivery book. On his jacket was white-taped script reading, “Moses Wilson.” The brass badge on his cap said, Chief Porter.

  The old man looked up. “Yas, suh, white folks?”

  Cragin flashed his badge. Moses stuttered, “I done tol’ de law, suh—”

  “Take it easy, Moses. Something we forgot.”

  “Done tol’ de law,” the porter persisted, “it ain’t my fault. If the boss didn’t put that no-good niggah to work, Miss Dalli’s trunk wouldn’t git lost. Mistah, y’all see whut ah wrote in de book—”

  There it was: trunk number five, checked out 3:30 P.M.

  “I don’t know wheah he kep’ it fo’ two hours.”

  Cragin noted the handler’s number. “Where’s Twenty-four now?”

  “Ought to be here, suh. He works de night shift, wif de night po’ter, and I goes off at seven, ex-actly.”

  “Wait a minute, Moses. If he—Twenty-four—”

  “Munkgomery Diggs, suh!”

  “If Diggs is on the night shift, how come he worked this afternoon with you?”

  “Well, suh, seeing as nobody ain’t axed me dat yet, I’ll explain it careful. This Munkgomery Diggs is a yaller niggah from Chicargo. And you know how it is, gitting help these days, yo’ hires jest anything a-tall, as long as he can walk. So he gets on de night shift, when dey ain’t hardly no po’tering to do.”