Murder in the Grand Manor

by Tom Hoke

  Jim showed up at the big house exactly at six-thirty and didn't get around to even pushing the doorbell. "Hahlo" opened the door before he could get his hand up. The big house tied in well for a guy who went for Russells and Remingtons.

  A great living room was studded with expensive leather chairs, a flock of very good oriental rugs, some more Russell’s, and a Remington. A couple of serapes were bright on the north wall. But, there was something wrong about the house. Mitchell's man pointed to a bar at the end of the room next to an enormous fireplace. Jim poured a drink, wondered if it ever got cold enough to use the fireplace here in hell, and tried to figure out what was missing.

  Obviously Mitchell wasn't married. Certainly there were no little feminine loving-hands-at-home touches anywhere in the room. There was nothing personal except the large gold letter M that seemed to crop up everywhere.

  And then it dawned on him. There was not a single book anywhere in sight. It looked like the lobby of a hotel in Yellowstone Park, devastatingly impersonal. He couldn't imagine a room without books. Not until now.

  Maybe Mitchell couldn't read.

  "Hello!" He jumped. Mitchell had come in so quietly he had not heard his steps. Mitchell was frowning and abstract as he nodded at Jim and poured himself a drink. He got down to business in a hurry. "Meet Jerry's plane tomorrow night at Love Field in Dallas. Here's his picture and flight information so you won't miss him." Mitchell handed over a photo of a most unlikable man. He was round, short, wore glasses, and stared from the picture. Jim couldn't miss him…that he felt sure.

  Mitchell's man rang a bell, and Jim followed Mitchell into the dining room. The massive table was set at each end. He needed a megaphone if Mitchell chose to converse. But he didn't. "Hahlo" and his boss seemed to be trying to win a Golden Globe award for taciturnity. The man was the only help Mitchell had. Anyway, the food was excellent, Angus steak, baked Idaho potatoes, and a green salad, accompanied by a choice Merlot.

  Jim was glad he liked his steak well done.

  That's the way he got it. After dinner, Mitchell rose abruptly, and Jim was dismissed. "I'm leaving in half an hour," Mitchell said. "I'll be in touch. Try the girl at the office in the morning to confirm the arrival time of Jerry's plane." So, he wasn't inclined toward conversation. For two thousand bucks, Jim could take it. This was a guy he could do without. But there was the money and his damned curiosity.

  Outside it was still hot and the wind pushed him back to the guest house. Who says Chicago has a monopoly on wind? Seventh Street in Fort Worth, Texas was a perfect wind tunnel, so he had found out. On the top of Beau Mitchell's bleak hill, the wind stung your eyes when you faced it, and tore at you when you walked away from it. Jim felt uneasy about this job. That was for openers.

  He didn't sleep well in Mitchell's guest house.

  Later on he wished he had. Instead of counting proverbial sheep, he wondered why he had any compulsion to take this job. The money really wasn't that important. He didn't like Beau Mitchell. He was fairly sure he wouldn't like Jerry Duprey. It could only be curiosity. Mitchell was an enigma. He shuddered over a double bourbon and finally fell asleep.

  When he went to meet Jerry Duprey, he almost missed him for two reasons. First, Duprey had a hat, and second he didn't have on glasses.

  Anyway, it just goes to prove a picture presents only one dimension. At first sight Jerry Duprey looked slightly stupid, but Jim began to doubt it soon. And the picture didn't show how black his hair was or how black his eyes were behind the glasses in the picture.

  Later Jim found out somewhere inside Dupreys portly exterior was a rather complex man. It was possible twenty-five years before he had been his mother's darling little roly-poly six year old uninhibited son. But Jim bet he wouldn't have liked the man even then. Jim didn’t like children just because they are children. To him, as people grow older, they are more of whatever they were to begin with.

  On some it's becoming. Not on Jerry Duprey.

  Even at the first meeting he recognized something remotely curious about Duprey.

  Jim might have been more interested in him if he thought his role would be more than a playboy baby-sitter. Maybe this would teach him a lesson. But first impression indicated the guy was scared.

  Duprey put on his glasses and took off his hat to mop his brow, and Jim caught up with him.

  "You Duprey?" he asked. The man turned around fast. "Yeah, who are you?" He stuck out his chin, but his voice didn't seem too firm.

  "Name's Jim Smith, Mitchell sent me. He's out of town." Jim stuck out a fist and got a handful of limp fish and a trace of a grasp at the end of his fingers, along with a cold blank stare. He was going to love this guy. Duprey gave the same big stupid smile Jim had noted in the picture, but his eyes were anything but stupid.

  "Beau's gone?" Jim nodded. This was finally getting through to him. Jim watched Duprey relax. Finally the man said: "You like night spots, Smith?"

  Jim sighed. For two thousand bucks he was wild about night spots. "Yeah, sure, shall we eat first?" he asked hopefully. Duprey went for the meal idea, and Jim steered him to a good restaurant.

  Their first meal together didn't enchant Jim.

  This guy was a taker. He took over everything at the table, including his salad, his first drink when he went to the restroom, and his desert.

  Duprey took everything but the check. He even took over too many drinks and got a little garrulous. Any sentence with over six words indicated he was garrulous. It didn't make much sense to Jim, but he was listening.

  Duprey had a broken record going on this one.

  "Just you wait, Smith. Just you wait! Beau too!" and he squinted at him until Jim could hardly see his eyes. Jim tried to make Duprey come up with more, but it was no use. He finally decided they had absolutely nothing in common. Maybe Jim was uncharitable, but this job didn't appear to be a cinch.

  It wasn't. They did the town and Dallas too for the first few nights. Jim knocked off the liquor except for a shot now and then to keep him going. Duprey accepted everything as if he deserved the red carpet treatment. When they hit the dumps, he would pick up some babe and take her off into a corner, feeding her drinks and chugalugging his own, leaving Jim the bill. Jim always got stuck with his girl friend's unwashed female companion, and he always got a giggler. Duprey managed to get drunk and a spot vindictive about two in the morning. Jim got to be a clock watcher. At least Duprey slept until noon every day. But, after a bunch of mad merry nights Duprey started to question where Mitchell was. This Jim couldn't answer because he had never heard back from their host.

  On the fifth morning after Jerry's arrival, Jim was summoned to the main house, leaving Duprey snoring peacefully in bed. Mitchell's man answered the door and pointed to the telephone in the hall. "Mr. Mitchell wants to talk to you, Mr. Smith." He picked up the telephone. Mitchell must have been at the other end of the earth because the connection was lousy and his voice indistinct.

  "How you doing, Smith," he asked.

  "Peachy-dandy!" Jim replied sarcastically.

  "You should have upped it a thousand."

  Mitchell ignored his reply. "Jerry still there, Smith?"

  "Yeah," Jim said, "Sleeping it off."

  Mitchell's voice crackled. "Keep him there, Smith. You just keep Duprey there!" He hung up.

  Jim returned to the guest house to find Jerry rummaging in the kitchen for some breakfast.

  He let him have at it. Nursemaid he was, but nobody said he was to be a cook. Duprey came into the living room and plunked his short body in a chair and took a drink of tomato juice. For a guy who had little on his mind but his social activities, he came out with a question, looking at Jim shrewdly. "How did you get your job with Mitchell?" he asked.

  "I ran into him in San Antonio a few weeks ago," Jim answered truthfully. Then, not so truthfully: "He needed a public relations man."

  Jerry forgot him. "When's he coming home?" he asked for the nine hundredth time.

  Jim was star
ting to catch the drift. "Any time, Duprey, you know how he is. How about hitting a new spot tonight? The Stripper", he suggested, but Dupery’s mind for once seemed to be on something else.

  Duprey stared at the telephone until Jim asked,

  "Shall I make a reservation, Duprey?" He frowned, still staring at the phone. He didn't catch the sarcasm in Jim’s question, and Jim didn't repeat it. Duprey puzzled him, but not enough for his own good.

  "Okay, The Stripper," he finally answered.

  A few nights on the town must have dulled Jim’s responses. He should have paid attention to Dupery’s abstraction. He wished he had. That night they groped their way through an almost male audience and found a table. For once Jerry pulled out a bottle. Jim should have known better. It took only one drink to put him in the land of nod. It was a lousy drink, made up of two jiggers of booze and one Mickey. Jim woke up on a couch in the men's room, and Jerry was long gone.

  The show was over and the janitor was cleaning up the place. He didn't seem surprised to see Jim. Nice place this one. Of course the car was gone too. But, as nobody had rolled Jim in his slumber, he still had a pocket full of Mitchell's money. So he called a cab. His watch said it was four in the morning.

  He had the taxi driver let him out at the gate.

  After the taxi left, he circled the guest house.

  He didn't see a car in front, but that didn't mean it wasn't in back. He looked around and then across at the big house and had the strangest feeling it was empty. Maybe Mitchell's man was having a night on the town.

  Jim fumbled open the back door to the guest house, which surprised him by being unlocked, and he switched on the light in the living room. The house was empty. He was right. How was he going to explain this to Beau Mitchell? Jerry's clothes and his bag were gone, and the room was a mess, with half-opened drawers, and a welter of papers in the wastebasket. Jim didn't find much until he reached the bottom of the basket, where a torn up Express Mail envelope attracted his attention. It was addressed to Mr. Jerry Duprey, as he found after difficulty in piecing it together. The return address was the Grand Manor Hotel, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. It had been mailed two days before. He slipped it into a pocket. Maybe this was something to go on, slim as it was. He had to have a try at getting Duprey back before Mitchell returned.

  A small matter of a thousand bucks was very much at stake, along with some pride.

  It had dawned on him on the way home from the strip joint, a little belatedly; that all Duprey had to do was to hear the conversation with Mitchell on the phone to get antsy. And all he had to do was pick up the phone in the guest house. Jim remembered Dupery’s thoughtful glance at the telephone. Maybe he didn't like to be confined. Maybe he didn't like the tone of Mitchell's voice. Jim didn't either. But he had to run Jerry down whether he liked it or not.

  Jim called the garage at the airport and asked if a car had been left in the reserved parking spot. He used Mitchell's name to speed up the answer. He got it. The car was there. So, he called to make reservations for a flight to New Orleans. A look at the map showed Bay St.

  Louis, Mississippi was about fifty miles east of New Orleans on the Mississippi Gulf coast.

  He had to start somewhere. Jerry Duprey was probably taking off for New Orleans when he called. Jim booked a flight to New Orleans leaving at noon.

  He slammed down the telephone and sank into a chair. His head felt like it had been pounded with a shovel. He had to make some kind of try to get Jerry Duprey back to Fort Worth.

  Maybe it was a matter of pride, but he had to.

  He packed in a hurry, and just for luck went out the door he had come in and carried his bag to the main house. There was one car in the garage with a key in it. He took it.

  By the time he got to the airport, he was feeling better. It was a good thing, because from there on it was an obstacle race. The plane was late.

  After he landed in New Orleans in a pouring rain, he missed the limousine that runs along the coast by five minutes. A funeral blocked his rental car even if he could have hurried through horizontal sheets of rain. And there was more rain.

  Traffic crawled with him in and out of the city on the Chef Menteur highway. He stopped for a bite to eat at a roadside cafe. The food was lousy, and when he came out he had a flat tire.

  It certainly seemed everything and everybody conspired against his getting to Bay St. Louis.

  Maybe he should have heeded the conspiracy.

  He wished he had. Long before he crossed into Mississippi he was plain mad and fresh out of sense. By the time he reached Bay St. Louis, he was livid.

  This was before he found the Grand Manor Hotel. And this was before he became Charlie Smith with a newly acquired Aunt Annie, and her nuttier friend, Lena Mantel, who had a taste for Camilles.

  By this time everything seemed unreal. It seemed unreal until he took a look at George, the flabby bartender, whose thirty-eight was aimed at his head. He came to the party.

  This was real!

  Chapter 4

  His newly acquired Aunt Annie took her eyes from the bartender and raised them toward the ceiling. He followed suit. She said,

  "Well, what are you going to do about it?"

  Jim reflected on the thirty-eight. It did things to his scalp. Apparently the bartender didn't trust him any more than the desk clerk. He didn’t like guns pointed at him, loaded or unloaded. But it also seemed quite obvious he was trying to throw a scare into Jim. The gun was there, all right, but hidden quite casually and clumsily.

  Aunt Annie repeated her question as if he hadn't heard it. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" He lowered his chin as she lowered hers and looked her squarely in the eye. "Nothing, Aunt Annie," he said sweetly,

  "nothing at all. After all, he does have the drop on me, don't you think?"

  Lena, Lady Mantel's voice was raised over the music which turned off suddenly. "Bring us another round, Garcon!" she shouted in the direction of the bar. The gun had disappeared, at least out of Jim’s sight. Why the switch? He wondered. Why the gun, and why did he jerk it out of sight? There was the beer drinker, Aunt Annie, Lena, and Jim. He heard a stirring in the doorway which might have answered the last part of the questions.

  George stared for a moment in the direction of the commotion, fiddled around the bar, and came over with two Camilles and a bourbon and water. He swabbed the table and moved the drinks before them with an unintelligible grunt. At least he had not brought another Camille for Jim. That showed some kind of intelligence. When George was out of hearing, Jim leaned over and said: "Are there any other guests in this establishment, ladies?"

  They both came to attention and Lena's mouth dropped open. Jim was all set to lead to Jerry Duprey, but suddenly before he could pop the question, Lena pounded her gloved fist on the table and shouted: "I am never going into that barbershop again as long as I live!" Jim saw Aunt Annie's eyes flick to the doorway. Then she touched her friend on the shoulder. "Why not, Lena dear?" she asked anxiously, "Why on earth not?"

  Jim crossed his legs and shifted his body so he could see the door. Sure enough, the desk clerk, Leddon, was standing there looking like a reasonable facsimile of an undertaker's assistant. Jim didn't wonder how long he'd been there.

  Lena seemed completely unaware of him. She said sharply, "Why not, Annie? Do you know that dunderhead refused to cut my hair unless I removed my hats?" Jim began to think Lena was carrying things a bit too far. She was far…far out. He felt like he was living in some sort of nightmare.

  George reached up and turned out the bar lights. His beer customer weaved through a door at the far left which must have led to the outside. "The bar is closed for the night,"

  George announced firmly.

  Jim cringed as he watched the two old girls upend their Camilles. Neither of them seemed the worse for Auntie's concoction when they rose with considerable dignity. He took his glass with him against George's frown. In the lobby, Brother Leddon was again planted behind the desk. He
offered a smile which reminded Jim of the spread on the mouth of a hammer-head shark. "Are you staying with us long, Mr. Smith?" Leddon asked.

  Jim decided to make him happy, but not too happy. "Not too long," he replied, trying to look properly undone. With this ambiguous remark, he followed Auntie and Lena up the stairs, wishing he could give Leddon a short right hook. But he had to find Jerry Duprey first, and there would be other opportunities, he was sure.

  As they walked down the hall he managed to get out half a question, "Where is…?" when the door across from Auntie's room opened. The light from inside outlined a bristle-haired man who filled the opening from side to side. What was with the watchdog bit? The man’s appearance certainly stopped Jim’s question in midair. He shrugged and opened Aunt Annie's door. She and Lena scuttled through the opening like a pair of Siamese twins, with Aunt Annie beckoning surreptitiously. "Shall we have a little visit before bed, Auntie?" he asked loudly and closed the door with a bang.

  A little of his growing annoyance was showing up.

  Auntie's room was no more charming than his.

  True, the flowers on the wall were of a different hue than his, and the spread on the bed was faded lavender. But, below an ancient ceiling fan was a large ornate chandelier, a complete anachronism which would have dwarfed a banquet hall. He blinked as she flicked the switch bringing the prisms on the chandelier to life.

  "Lena has the room on the other side of mine."

  Auntie was saying. She pointed to the chandelier, and Lena assumed a poetic stance directly beneath it and began humming loudly in a clear monotone. Auntie rolled her eyes and motioned for Jim to put his head down.

  She whispered in his ear: "The joint is bugged!" and pointed her finger at the heavy chandelier. By this time Lena was beginning to get weary of humming. Jim turned his glass up and finished the drink. Maybe the Camilles hadn't affected Lena and Annie, but the Grand Manor Hotel and booze combined to make him feel as goofy as these two women acted.