“That’s also my business.”
“Naturally,” the inspector admitted. “Nevertheless, the police are curious to know where, if not from you, your wife procured the two hundred dollars she has spent with the bookmakers this spring?”
Dan Mosby’s face seemed to have shrivelled. “I don’t believe it,” he said at last, his eyes dull and old.
The inspector sighed. There was a laboured silence and then, hitching slowly to her feet, Lottie Mosby held out her small shaking hands to her husband in a gesture which broke my heart.
“It’s true, Dan,” she said faintly. “I have lost two hundred dollars to the bookies, and I – and I got the money from-from-”
“From the men who bought your favours behind your husband’s back,” said the inspector.
“Yes.”
The word fell upon the silence of that room like a groan. It seemed to me its echo would never die. Slumping back into his chair, Dan Mosby covered his face with his hands, leaving her standing there, swaying a little, her eyes staring at him pleadingly though quite without hope.
“I kept thinking each day I’d win and – and be free,” she faltered. “Free of the whole horrible business! I didn’t want to be bad, Dan. I just got in and couldn’t get out.”
He did not lift his head or speak, and after a while she said sadly, “I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me if you knew.”
He looked up then, his face contorted with loathing. “Forgive you? I’d see you in hell first.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I thought you’d feel like that.”
“I can’t stand much more of this,” muttered Stephen Lansing. “For God’s sake,” he cried to the inspector, “haven’t you any mercy?”
But the inspector was a man hunter close to the kill. “You murdered James Reid, Lottie Mosby!” he said harshly.
“No, no!”
“It wasn’t small fry like you he was after, but when he stumbled onto your wretched secret he tried to blackmail you, and so you killed him.”
“Good Lord, Inspector,” protested Howard Warren, “she’s only a little scrap. She couldn’t hang a man up by his suspenders to a chandelier, much less cut his throat.”
“James Reid was a very slight man,” said the inspector, “and the strength of a desperate woman would surprise you, Mr Warren.”
“I didn’t kill him,” whispered Lottie Mosby.
The inspector produced a sheet of paper on which other small pieces of paper had been pasted. “This,” he said, “is the note which Lottie Mosby left in James Reid’s box at the desk a little before six yesterday afternoon.” He held it out. “It will do you no good to deny it, Mrs Mosby. The experts at headquarters have identified your handwriting.”
Her lips quivered. “I don’t deny I wrote it,” she faltered.
“It reads like this,” murmured the inspector. “ ‘I have paid all I can. There isn’t any more. But if you tell my husband about me, I’ll get you and I don’t mean maybe.’ It is too bad from your viewpoint, Mrs Mosby, that when James Reid tore up your note he left the pieces in the wastebasket in his room.”
Her eyes were unnaturally distorted, her voice frantic.
“I’m not going to hang for something I didn’t do!” she screamed. “I don’t want to die! Not until I’ve washed away my sins! I didn’t kill James Reid, and I-I won’t be the goat!”
She was out of the room before anyone guessed her purpose. The rest of us, shocked by her sensational outburst, began to mill about like stampeded cattle. The inspector, biting his lip, hurried out into the hall and barked rapid questions at two startled policemen.
“She darted up the stairs there,” stammered one.
“After her!” cried the inspector furiously. “She’s gone to her room on the fourth floor!”
Dan Mosby continued to sit with his head in his hands. It seemed inhuman to stay there, gaping at his misery. By twos and threes we drifted away. A police car roared up outside, and four more policemen swarmed into the hotel.
“Find her if you have to take the place apart!” I heard the inspector shouting.
However, at the end of fifteen minutes Lottie Mosby still had not been found. What with the police running hither and yon, peering in at doors, even opening cabinets not large enough to conceal a kitten, and with the guests in the house being pushed about everywhere while protesting bitterly against the violation of their privacy, it would be difficult to imagine a more confused quarter of an hour. No wonder that later nobody could give a coherent account of his movements during the fatal moments.
I recall, though I could not have proved it, that I was standing in the lobby, rehearsing in my mind the scathing terms in which I intended to inform Sophie Scott that I was moving out the minute the police lifted their ban, when I heard the thud, that single dreadful sound which still at times rings in my ears.
Nobody would believe, unless he felt it, that one slight body striking the roof over the employees’ entry could shake an entire building from top to bottom. Of course, she was dead when they found her. I pray she never knew what hit her, poor little thing, lying face upward on the paved alleyway at the back of the hotel, her eyes staring up with a terrible bewilderment at the indifferent blue sky above her.
“Dead!” gasped Dan Mosby, kneeling beside her and gathering the small broken body into his trembling arms. “Oh, Lottie, Lottie! Why did you do it? If only you could come back, I’d forgive you. I’d forgive you anything, Lottie, if you’d come back.”
Howard Warren, to whose hand I was clinging, was not ashamed to let me see the tears on his cheek. “She couldn’t face it,” he said thickly. “And who can blame her? Suicide is kinder than the hangman.”
The inspector put a shaking hand up to his lips. “At least she’s saved the state the expense of a trial,” he sighed.
I glared about me. “If you ask me, she was practically hounded into a life of infamy,” I said bitterly. “A little tolerance and understanding might have saved her. In my opinion her blood is on all our hands.”
“Yes,” said Ella Trotter, blowing her nose.
Hilda Anthony smiled unpleasantly. “If a few more of your old hens had a change of heart, the Richelieu might not be such a dismal hole to live in.”
“Is that so?” I demanded, giving her a dose of her own bitters.
“You’re accepting this as suicide and a confession of murder, Inspector?” asked Stephen Lansing, his face drawn and tired.
The inspector nodded. “That’s how it’ll go down in the record,” he said and drew a long breath. “I don’t mind confessing I’m glad to close the case. It had me going around in circles for a while.”
“We can all rest easier to know that none of the rest of us is a murderer in disguise,” murmured Ella Trotter, sounding very shaky for her.
Polly Lawson smiled weakly. “It was pretty terrible for us suspects,” she said.
“Yes!” cried Kathleen Adair in a choked voice. “Thank God, it’s all over,” sighed Sophie, leaning heavily on Cyril’s arm.
“Except,” said Stephen Lansing quietly, “it isn’t over.”
We all gasped and stared at him.
“One of us is a double murderer,” he said.
The inspector turned violently red.
“What are you driving at?” he demanded furiously.
“You are still going around in circles so far as this case is concerned, Inspector,” drawled Stephen Lansing with a twisted smile.
“Explain yourself,” snapped Inspector Bunyan.
“This poor girl did not kill herself. She is another victim. Somebody in this hotel is a double murderer.”
“Impossible!” cried the inspector.
Stephen Lansing knelt by that small shattered body which Dan Mosby was still cradling in his arms and turned back the frivolous little lace collar about Lottie Mosby’s childish white neck.
“Mrs Mosby,” said Stephen gravely, “did not throw herself out of a window. She was hurled to the
ground after she had been strangled to death.”
He pointed to cruel livid marks, already turning dark, on the girl’s thin young throat. Then his gaze travelled slowly around the group gathered about Lottie Mosby’s crumpled body.
“She told us she did not kill Reid, but I think she knew who did,” he said.
“Good God!” gasped Howard Warren. “Then she, too, was-was killed to-to...”
“Like James Reid, she was killed to preserve somebody’s guilty soul,” said Stephen Lansing and added gently, “God rest her poor stained soul.”
10
It is the human instinct in time of stress to seek lights and a crowd, and so the dining room in the Richelieu was filled that night with haggard and sober faces, albeit nobody had an appetite. I suppose everyone felt as I did. The sight of food was a little sickening, yet anything was better than being cooped up alone in my room.
Lottie Mosby’s pathetic body had been taken away by the police, its immediate destination the morgue, to lie, until the coroner’s inquest, alongside that of James Reid, to me a horrible thought. Dan Mosby was in the hospital under a physician’s care.
The shock of his wife’s tragic fate had completed the havoc already wrought by liquor upon his none too stable temperament.
“Poor devil,” muttered Stephen Lansing just before we all went in to dinner that night, “he’s in a bad way. Mind temporarily a blank.”
I sighed. “It’s just as well. He’ll have a long time in which to remember.”
“At least,” said Howard, “the police have eliminated him from the list of suspects, if he was ever really on.”
“Yes,” said Stephen, “Mosby’s the only person in the house who has an alibi for the last murder.”
Howard nodded. “He never stirred out of that chair in the parlour till after she struck, poor fellow.”
I shivered again. I did not have to close my eyes to see that slight form hurtling downward onto the sloping narrow roof over the employees’ entrance and then sliding limply off to the paved court below it.
“It seems to me,” murmured Howard, glancing sharply at Stephen Lansing, “that in this instance the murderer has overshot his hand. I mean, after all, it ought to be possible for the police to locate the window from which she-er-fell. There should be marks on the sill, wouldn’t you think?”
Stephen frowned. “The police haven’t taken me into their confidence,” he said brusquely. “If you are out pumping for information, Warren, why don’t you ask the inspector himself if he’s located the room from which the girl was thrown?”
“Damn you, are you suggesting that I – that I ...” began Howard heatedly.
I made a testy gesture. “Tut, tut,” I said, “all this is trying enough without our flying at each other at every opportunity like bantam roosters. You are unnecessarily thin skinned lately, Howard, and as for you, Mr Lansing, I consider Howard’s question a perfectly natural one. I myself would give something to know if the police have any clue as to where Lottie Mosby met her doom.”
“I don’t doubt you’d like to know, Adelaide,” said Stephen disagreeably.
“I don’t in the least doubt it.”
It was my turn to flare up. “Are you insinuating that I – that I...”
Howard laughed. “Now who’s flying off the handle?”
Somewhat sheepishly I subsided, and Stephen gave us both a sardonic grin. “From now on, unless I’m greatly mistaken,” he said grimly, “it’s going to be every man for himself in this investigation and the devil take the hindmost.”
I did not doubt it. One had only to glance around at the various tables in the dining room that night to feel the hostility which was rising to fever heat among us. Only a short while before we had been a normal group of civilized human beings, the majority of us rather better bred than the average, I should say, but under the threat of violence and personal danger we were fast reverting to the primitive, where self-preservation is the first law of the pack.
Nobody that night was disposed to meet anybody else’s gaze frankly, and back of the furtive glances which we did exchange lurked suspicion and other vicious thoughts, their ugly heads reared in our eyes like serpents. It was painfully apparent from that moment on that not one of us trusted the other. Speech was guarded, unless betrayed by anger into virulent attack. If possible, people did not say what they were thinking. After all, two in that house had already paid with their lives for knowing more than it was safe to know. Yet if anybody did forget himself sufficiently to bring his ideas out into the open, he invariably went too far, as temper generally does.
I myself was no exception. Already worried and upset, it irritated me to the boiling point to find a new waitress installed at my table, a floozy young woman with hennaed hair and prominent hips which she had a habit of flaunting as she walked. She was not inexperienced – in fact, she seemed to know her business thoroughly; nevertheless, she was the grievance which broke the camels back so far as I was concerned.
I crooked my finger imperiously at Cyril Fancher, and when he approached, with obvious reluctance, I regarded him in a jaundiced manner over my spectacles and remarked in my most caustic style, “Of course, I am merely a guest, just one of those who pay the bills, and I realise a guest in this house is regarded by the management as a necessary evil with absolutely no rights in how the place should be run; nevertheless might I be so bold as to inquire what you have done with the girl Annie?”
To my utter astonishment Cyril Fancher turned white, as white as if I had accused him of murder or worse. “What do you mean?” he demanded in a quaking falsetto. “How dare you intimate that I have-have...”
I suppose he saw by my expression that he was behaving more than customarily like a fool, for he paused abruptly, bit his lip, and attempted one of his inane jokes, though his voice was still not quite steady.
“You surely don’t hold me personally responsible, Miss Adams,” he murmured, trying to look both arch and ingratiating at the same time, “for these little fly-by-nights who flit from job to job like Eliza – wasn’t it? – skipping over the ice floes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
“You should know by now, Cyril Fancher,” I said sharply, “that no well brought-up Southern woman ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin or allowed that obnoxious book to be mentioned in her presence.”
“Yes,” he said, “I did know, only I forgot. Please accept my apology.”
He gave me an obsequious glance.
“I suppose no offence can be taken where none was intended,” I conceded grudgingly.
“Thanks,” he said and started to move away, an expression of relief upon his face.
I frowned. “You still haven’t told me what happened to Annie,” I called after him sharply.
He looked back over his shoulder with a grimace.
“Nothing has happened to her so far as I know,” he snapped.
“She simply informed me at noon today that she had found a better place and wouldn’t be back.”
“I hope she’s right,” I sighed. “So often these young girls seem to go from here to worse.”
Again he stared at me with a startled face.
“What do you mean?” he stammered.
“What could I mean,” I demanded impatiently, “except that waitresses appear to me to have a genius for popping off the griddle into the blaze?”
“Yes?”
I knit my brows. “There was that Gwendolyn,” I said. “Didn’t she get run over by a truck after she left here, trying to hitchhike her way to Hollywood?”
“I believe I saw something to that effect in the paper,” he admitted in his noncommittal way.
I shook my head. “She was a silly chit,” I said, “but you’d think even a Dumb Dora would know that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points or at least that southeast on the New Orleans highway is no short cut to Hollywood.”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I suppose if they had any intelligence to speak of, they wouldn�
�t be hopping tables,” he said.
“I suppose not,” I agreed pensively.
This time he succeeded in making his escape, disappearing kitchen ward with a haste which gave me a feeling of acute satisfaction.
I did not like Cyril Fancher and I may as well acknowledge that it always afforded me pleasure to give him an uncomfortable moment. There was no one, in fact, upon whom I would rather have vented my spleen, and our little tilt had done a great deal toward clearing up my disposition. It enabled me to inquire the name of my new waitress with less acidity than might otherwise have been the case.
“Gloria, madam, Gloria Larue,” she informed me blandly.
Nee Lizzie Brown or Jones, I thought to myself, eyeing her blunt nose and rouged mouth and the large knuckles of her reddened but capable hands.
“I see you also take after the movies,” I remarked dryly.
She looked me over for a moment and then nodded vigorously.
“Ya-uss. All us girls do. Don’t you?” she said with an enthusiastic smile.
I coughed. “Well, not exactly,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I loathe them.”
From that time on Miss Gloria Larue made no attempt to engage me in conversation although she was scrupulously careful about attending to my wants. I think she would have cut up my meat and spoon-fed me had I allowed her. I seemed to have been pigeonholed in her category as a mental deficient, a sad case though harmless.
Glancing about the dining room that night I did not feel any too complacent myself about the workings of my head piece, which I had been in the habit of regarding as an excellent bit of machinery.
It seemed to me that being in the very centre of things I should have had in my hands all the necessary threads to the intricate and sinister tangle in which we found ourselves involved at the Richelieu Hotel. If so, I was compelled to admit that I was too stupid to recognize them.
A number of curious things occurred to me as I studied my neighbours at the other tables. I was aware of queer undercurrents, of inexplicable divergences from the normal in the conduct of certain people, of puzzling incidents which I had seen or shared, but what it all meant I was at a loss to say. Nor could I find answers to the questions buzzing in my ears like a horde of mosquitoes.
Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) Page 10