by Paul Ernst
The Ring and Rose. They knew where that was, in the store. Out route 136, five miles northwest of Sea City, on the road to Euler’s Grove. It was a roadhouse run by a character named Marvin Bailey.
The Ring and Rose was on the west edge of the marsh separating the mainland from the ocean dunes. It was very fancy, with yellow face brick in front, and glass brick in stripes around the doorway, and with a big sign that at night would light up with a lot of neon. Pretty big, too; apparently it drew from half a dozen of the shore towns nearby.
Several cars in the extensive crushed-shell parking lot hinted that the Ring and Rose served lunch; and it was now two o’clock and I was hungry. I parked, too, and went in the doorway flanked by its glass bricks, and the inside seemed as dark as a cave for a moment after the brilliant June sunlight. Then I saw tables and wall booths in a front room, and a darkened double doorway to the rear, leading to the much bigger room where the night crowd was accommodated.
I sat down in a booth and a waitress came to take my order. She was pushing forty and had a mop of hair so frankly hennaed that you didn’t mind its being hennaed. She had a nice, broad, honest-looking face.
I picked sandwich, soup and coffee, and looked around at posters proclaiming that after nine the Ring and Rose presented to the customers a floor show featuring the best talent of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The waitress came with the soup. I said it was nice soup, and she smiled impersonally, and after a while she came with the sandwich.
“The Ring and Rose,” I said musingly, as if more to myself than to her. “Why, this must be the place Dick worked in for a little while last year.”
“Dick?” said the waitress, pushing her red hair back from her forehead.
“Dick Rosslyn. Dancer from New York. You wouldn’t know about him, I guess. Or do you work here nights, too?”
“Just days, till seven o’clock,” she said.
She came back with the coffee. “Say! He was the one got killed in an auto accident last year, wasn’t he?”
I nodded. “Poor guy. It broke his sister up in business for a while. A few other females, too—it sure wasn’t a sister he was at Sea City with last June.”
She grinned a little. “No, I don’t think it was. Are you in show business, too?”
“Me?” I laughed. “No, thanks. I’m insurance. I know some show people, though.”
She took the sandwich plate away and, after a minute, came back again.
“Too bad your friend had to get it that way. He was a pretty good dancer, I hear. I didn’t see him—I have a family to get home to in the evenings.”
“A good dancer,” I agreed. “He and his sister made a nice team. And then he had to go and run into a truck’s rear end. It’s a good thing we can’t read the future—he was happy as a clam in a mud bank when he wrote back, just two days before he was killed, from that motel.”
“Motel?” said the waitress. She wrinkled her forehead, and I thought I’d lost out on my little stab in the dark. I’d just ventured “motel” because there were ten of those around here for every other kind of stopping place, and because most of ’em are off by themselves.
“I wouldn’t know about the motel,” she said. “Unless it was the Crescent. A couple of times, going home, I passed him on the Euler’s Grove road, and the Crescent’s the only thing out that way, and it’s kind of…” Three men had been sitting over coffee and low-voiced talk at a front table. Now they got up and two of them walked toward the door and the third walked toward the waitress and me. He was about my height but looked as if he had enough muscles to bust me in two if he cared to do so. He had black hair and opaque dark eyes, and his mouth looked competent for eating but not at all for smiling.
He stood beside the waitress, looking at me and then at her, and he didn’t say anything. The waitress felt impelled to break a silence that was growing more than awkward.
“This is Mr. Bailey, the proprietor,” she said nervously to me.
I said, “Cates. Sam Cates. Nice place you have here.” Mr. Bailey still said nothing, and now the silence was more than awkward, it was bleak. The waitress bit her lip as if wishing fervently that she had never let it flap in the first place.
“Mr. Cates is—was—a friend of Dick Rosslyn’s,” she continued, babbling a bit in her growing apprehension. “You know, the one who…”
“I know,” said Bailey. His dark, expressionless eyes were concentrating on me now, having promised the waitress some unpleasantness in the immediate future.
She scuttled off, looking back over her shoulder at the proprietor. Bailey continued to stand at my table looking down at me. “Sorry she bothered you,” he said. His voice was soft but not reassuring. “You don’t want to hear a lot of small talk, now, do you?”
I murmured that I hadn’t looked at it as small talk, just a few words exchanged about a mutual acquaintance—“We don’t talk about the help, here,” he said. “Particularly when they’re dead. I’ll get your check.”
He turned and padded to the kitchen doorway, through which the waitress had hurried an instant before. He was back there longer than was necessary just to get the check made out by her.
He put it beside my coffeecup, squaring its end neatly with the table edge. “If you’re wondering where Rosslyn stayed while he was here, it was the Sands Hotel, in Sea City.”
I moved my shoulders. “Thanks for nothing. I came in here for lunch. I remembered that Dick had worked here, I mentioned his name. So?”
“So, fine. Sorry you were bothered with a lot of gossip.” He went back to the table he’d been sitting at before, and I left a tip for the waitress and handed the check and a bill to the girl behind the counter.
I went out into the bright sunshine, pointed my car meekly toward Sea City, and then turned off and around toward Euler’s Grove. A man at a filling station told me where the Crescent Motel was.
Motels have had many comments made about them which they don’t deserve. Most of them are as respectable as most hotels. But then not all hotels are respectable, either.
The Crescent looked all right till after you had actually turned into the curving driveway in front of the semicircle of individual cabins. Then you began to sense the character of the place, hardly knowing why.
There was a certain lack of attempt at flower beds; the grass was not quite so well tended as it could have been; the white-painted board cabins needed touching up and were not as solid-appearing as the other big-time motels in this part of the country. A second-rate establishment reaching for the easy buck.
The center cabin was bigger than the others and had Office lettered over its doorway. I went in there. A front room had a small desk, a bench, a little stove, the latter near a door that opened onto some kind of living quarters in the rear. It was clean enough: the place did not look shabby or uncomfortable, just easy in its demands on the clientele.
On the desk was a registration card and the typical pen-and-ink stand, with a chain fastened to the pen so that, when a guest was through marking on the card, he would not walk off with the pen.
Registration cards. What I wanted to see was the cards for June of last year.
I looked at the blank card on the desk. On the upper left-hand corner, in ink, were the numerals, 68. So there had been sixty-seven previous registrations in June. At least I surmised that; it seemed improbable that there’d been only sixty-seven all year to date.
I heard a step in the rear, behind the closed door, and cleared my throat loudly. The door opened and a woman came out. She was much like the place—fairly well equipped but not too meticulously kept up. She was chewing gum. She nodded amiably and kept on chewing the gum.
“I’d like to reserve a cabin for tonight,” I said. “I’ll be back later with a—with my wife.”
She didn’t blink. She nodded and slid the registration card toward me. I started to sign and stopped with the pen poised.
“I’d like the same cabin I had last year,” I said, grinning a little she
epishly. “Sentimental reasons.”
“Which cabin was that?”
“I don’t quite remember,” I said. “I’ve been trying to, and I kept looking at them all as I drove in. I think it was Nine.” I’d noticed a car in the port beside Nine as I entered.
“That’s taken,” the woman replied. “Anyway, all the cabins are the same.”
“I know.” I made it apologetic. “But I want the same one just to show the—my wife that I remembered. You know, every little detail engraved on the brain so that it will never be lost? Only my engraving’s slipped.”
The woman shrugged and stepped to a filing cabinet behind her. She pulled out a drawer. “Name? I’ll look it up.”
Now I was stuck. I’d thought, or anyhow hoped, that she would just turn me loose with the cards. “You’ll think I’m crazy, but sometimes, just for laughs, I give a phony name. Mr. Oberfluffer, or General Silex, that kind of gag. I did last year, and I don’t remember what it could have been. If I see the cards for June…”
She closed the drawer. “Just for laughs, you give phony names. That’s okay, we all have reasons sometimes. But—so many you can’t remember which you gave where? You don’t look that handsome, mister.”
“I said you’d think I was crazy,” I replied dejectedly.
“That isn’t what I’m thinking. Who are you? A private eye or something?”
“No. I’m just a guy in the insurance business—”
There was the sound of a car being driven hell-bent from the direction of Euler’s Grove. Its brakes squealed and then gravel was scattered from the driveway in front. The door banged open and a man banged in.
He was a husky-looking gent, and a tough-looking gent. Also, just possibly, a scared-looking gent. He glared at the woman and then at me.
“Compliments of Marvin Bailey,” I murmured.
Glaring at me, the man said to the woman, “What’s he want?”
“Wants to see the cards for last June.”
“Did you show—”
“Certainly not,” said the woman. “That’s private property.”
The man heaved a great sigh of relief. I saw a fresh scar at his left temple, disappearing under the hairline. A trace of darkness under his right eye indicated that some days ago he might have had a shiner of monumental proportions.
“Beat it,” he said succinctly to me.
“But about this cabin for tonight…” I said to the woman.
“We’re full up,” said the man. “All cabins full. Beat it.”
I looked at his right eye and wondered if it had been a shiner that was responsible for that trace of darkness, and I looked at his left eye and considered giving it a shiner to match. I thought I could have; but there seemed little point in it. The fact that he was so upset about the registration cards for last June told me enough, I thought.
In the June file for last year there would be one card missing. One number gone in the sequence inked in the upper left-hand corners. I’d have bet a month’s pay on this.
“All right,” I told him haughtily. “If you don’t want my trade I’ll take it somewhere else.”
“Fine,” said the motel man, looking tough—and scared?
I started back for New York. The evidence I’d collected in and around Sea City would never have done for a court of law. It was all circumstantial, pieced out with guesses. But I didn’t have the courts in mind, and it was good enough for me.
Last year, in June, Dick Rosslyn had come to Sea City and there he had met a girl. He had registered at the Crescent Motel with her—no matter under what name—and had lived with her the week or so before he was killed.
In his effects, which had been shipped back probably by Marvin Bailey of the Ring and Rose, had been pictures and perhaps other evidence of this meeting. Someone connected with the Club 50, where Rosslyn worked more regularly, had got hold of this and had added to it by getting the damning registration card from the motel man.
There had followed some neat and methodical blackmailing. Against the girl.
What girl was being blackmailed?
Well, who had apparently stolen the Duysberg diamond and brought it to the 50?
Ellen Keppert.
8
I HALF-EXPECTED to find an icily furious Ryan at my apartment when I pulled in at a quarter after six. “What do you mean by taking a powder when I told you to stay around? Where the hell have you been all afternoon?”
There was no Ryan, and when I phoned the office, one of the bookkeepers there looked on my desk and said there were none but routine messages. I shucked the clothes and took a shower, thinking that the narrow little stall I was in was no tighter than the box that Ellen Keppert was in.
Not that it was any concern of mine. I told myself that quite vigorously.
Look what she’d done. A year ago she’d gone off with this Dick Rosslyn and stayed a week with him in a motel cabin. He had been killed before whatever plans they might have had in mind could be matured. Then Ellen, close relative and confidante of a U.S. Senator, blackmailed. Paying and paying since the dancer’s death. At last having her arm twisted till she stole the Duysberg diamond, probably being told that with this she could settle finally and permanently with the blackmailer.
Is that any kind of dame to get tangled up with or think too much of, I asked myself. Behave, Cates! Get your mind off femmes and back on blackmail and murder.
So—who had been the blackmailer? Dick’s sister, Rose, was one to whom Dick’s effects might logically have been sent. Had Rose been the blackmailer? The man’s own sister—I couldn’t believe it. Checckia, then? I thought him amply capable of it.
I’d saved the biggest, fattest name till last. The name that had come instantly to mind when Channing, of the Sea City Ledger, described the man who had anticipated my call ten days before. “Fellow about your age, only bigger and much prettier, and in the most elegant sports clothes I’ve seen in years.”
Howard Denham?
Denham getting into the act? Somehow getting wind of the blackmail setup and, ten days ago, finding out for himself what I had found out today? Beating out of the motel man the information I’d tried unsuccessfully to get? I recalled the fresh scar and the ghost of a shiner the man had sported. Denham was capable of it; he was almost professionally athletic.
So Denham could have been the one who put the slug on Ellen for the diamond. Though if he had just found out about the setup ten days ago, he couldn’t have been the one who blackmailed her before. Or hadn’t she been blackmailed till recently?
And where did the ten thousand in cash that Denham carried last night fit in? Had he demanded the diamond and ten thousand from Ellen? But if he’d been given the money he would have been given the diamond at the same time, you’d think. Had he been the one who’d managed to slip it into my pocket?
The riddle was still a riddle and still seemed apart from the murder of Rose Rosslyn. Which remained an enigma. To me, at any rate.
I dressed, thinking of the things people will do to escape the wrong kind of publicity. And then thinking of the fellow at the club last night whose name was synonymous with publicity of the cheapest and most undesirable sort.
Herblock Bohr.
I riffled through the Manhattan phone book. Bohr wasn’t there; evidently had an unlisted number. A call to a friend on the New York paper using his column got me his address.
For a smalltimer in the column racket, Bohr lived pretty well. The apartment building was small but expensive-looking. The lobby, where a high nosed desk man tried to prevent me from even phoning up to their distinguished client, was full of fancy furniture. The elevator was a little padded jewel box, and a manservant opened Bohr’s door at my ring.
“Show him in, Janes,” a voice called petulantly from an anteroom doorway.
The man, staring reproachfully at me, took my hat and led me to a small sitting room off the foyer. It was a literary-looking cell with books from floor to ceiling, but the books were arranged to
make pleasing color patterns instead of being helter-skelter in their shelves, so I was not impressed.
On the far side of a big table was a portable typewriter and seated importantly behind this, in a Chinese robe, was “the famous New York columnist whose pithy phrases, etc.,” Herblock Bohr.
“Cates?” he said, as if he’d never heard of me before. He looked at my card. “Insurance…” If he had said, “I don’t want any,” I’d have pasted him one. I did not like Mr. Bohr.
“Insurance adjuster,” I said.
“Do I have any insurance to adjust?” At my look he quickly smiled. “Let’s see, you were at the Club Fifty last night.”
“That’s right.”
“And you phoned up that you wanted a few words with me about it now.” Bohr touched his jaw, and probably his mental picture of the gesture was that of long, artistic fingers stroking the long, keen jaw of strength as well as genius. Actually he was a smallish pudgy man with pudgy fingers rubbing the rounded terminus of puffy jowls. “I can’t think what I know about the affair that I haven’t told to Ryan.”
“Have you talked to him some more today?” I asked.
His laugh was out of his elegant assumed character. It was a short, aggrieved bark. “Talked to him! The man got me out of bed at ten this morning. Ten o’clock! After all, I work till dawn, I breakfast at noon.”
“Most inconsiderate.” I grinned.
A frown formed on Bohr’s forehead. There was a lot of forehead for it to form on. “What’s your approach to this, Cates? Was Rose Rosslyn insured by your company?”
“Never heard of her before last night,” I said. “But in an odd sort of way, a case of mine ties in with the Rosslyn case. No need to take your time with explanations…”
“You’re taking it anyway,” Block pointed out peevishly. “Let’s have the explanations.”
“A valuable diamond, stolen recently from a client of ours, turned up last night after the murder. Nobody knows yet if there is a connection, but that’s why I’m buzzing around the fringes of the mess. I’m not police, of course. You don’t have to say a word to me if you don’t want to. But I know you are a responsible enough citizen to want to see justice done.”