Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2)

by Anita Blackmon

  “Suit yourself, Mr Warren,” murmured Inspector Bunyan with a shrug of his dapper shoulders.

  Polly was having hysterics in Ella Trotter’s arms in the corridor outside the parlour doors where we were all congregated. Setting his teeth, Howard went over to them and, laying his hand on Ella’s arm, said, “Tell her – tell her there’s nothing to worry about, Mrs Trotter. It won’t take a good lawyer five minutes to tear the inspector’s case to ribbons.”

  Polly did not lift her head, but her sobs diminished in violence.

  Still gazing at a point slightly above her dishevelled red curls, Howard went on in a halting voice, “Tell her, Mrs Trotter, that Mary’s lawyer and I will have her out on bond before midnight.”

  “Oh, thank you, Howard d-darling!” gasped Polly and then, when Howard in spite of himself reached out his hand to her, she turned away again and lifted her eyes pleadingly to Ella Trotter.

  “Please – please – I don’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone – Please can’t you make everybody let me alone?”

  Ella nodded vigorously. “Trust me to do that little thing.”

  She then and there carried Polly off to her suite and, having put her to bed on the living room davenport, mounted guard over both doors with an ‘only over my dead body’ expression which settled that. The rest of us, unable to conceal our dejection, trailed downstairs to the lobby where we collected in small scattered groups, talking in low tones if we talked at all but for the most part listening in leaden silence to the dreary monotone of the rain.

  Howard Warren, not having stopped even to get his raincoat, dashed past us on his way to meet Mary’s lawyer with whom he had made an engagement by telephone. I had known a day when Howard would not have risked spoiling the crease in his trousers, much less wet feet, in such weather. I sighed. He had no doubt been, as Polly said, a little on the holier-than-thou side at one time.

  He was so no longer. Howard had gone human with a vengeance, and I had never liked him half so well.

  His headlong course through the lobby, however, was checked by Stephen Lansing.

  “About bailing Mrs Lawson out, Warren,” he said with a frown, “do you think that’s altogether wise?”

  Howard stared at him. “Leave Mary down there at the mercy of those-those morons? Not one moment longer than is necessary!” he expostulated.

  “There are worse things to be at the mercy of than the law, Warren,” said Stephen Lansing, “as we should all be prepared to testify by now.”

  Howard paled. “You mean?”

  “I think it’s self-evident that Mrs Lawson knows a great deal.”

  “Why, you – you –”

  “If you ask me,” said Stephen Lansing gravely, “most of us could be in more dangerous places than securely locked up in jail for the next few days, particularly Mary Lawson with whatever it is she has on that conscience of hers.”

  “Damn it, Mary didn’t kill that swine!” protested Howard fiercely.

  However, as he went slowly out the revolving door of the hotel he had lost the major portion of his aggressiveness, and I think none of us was greatly surprised to hear a little before midnight that, after an interview with her lawyer, Mary had decided for the present not to apply for release on bond.

  “We did succeed in wringing one concession from the police,” said Howard when he returned, his face jaded though happier than when he left. “She has not been booked for murder. She’s being held as a material witness, or so the inspector gave out to the newspaper boys.” He smiled wryly. “At least we shan’t have her served up in headlines with our breakfast for the whole town to gape at.”

  “Thank God!” I muttered.

  Stephen nodded and said, “I don’t believe for a minute that the inspector thinks Mary Lawson is a murderess.” When we stared at him he added, with a gesture toward the stairs, “You notice he hasn’t called off his dogs.”

  “On the contrary,” snapped Sophie Scott. “You have only to try moving about, to see them poking their square heads around corners or from behind the doors of supposedly empty rooms, like roaches coming up out of the drains.”

  I did see a couple of uniformed men in my corridor, when a little after twelve our informal gathering in the lobby broke up and along with the others I trailed up to my room for a night toward which none of us, I think, looked forward with any degree of pleasure.

  To tell the truth, it gave me more of a comfortable sensation than not when I opened the door to 511 to know that in the hall behind me the policeman Sweeney, evidently under special orders, was staring fixedly at the back of my head.

  Even so, there was a bad minute when I stood there in the dark, fumbling for the light switch. I wondered if there would be time to scream if those two murderous hands clenched themselves about my throat or if one would be able to scream when face to face with that anonymous horror which needlessly mutilated the corpses of its victims with all the savagery of a perverted and diseased brain.

  However, when my cold and trembling fingers on the second attempt succeeded in turning the switch, there was nothing in the room before me of a sinister nature except one tiny scrap of blank brown wrapping paper which I had overlooked when I flushed the others down the sewer. The mirror was innocent of lascivious notes.

  The window on the fire escape was still closed and locked as I had left it. Nevertheless, my heart had a tendency to climb into my throat at the least unexpected noise, and it seemed to me I had never heard a night so full of weird creakings and stealthy footfalls and uncanny rappings.

  “It’s only the wind, rattling doors and windows,” I told myself stoutly, but my blood pressure continued to mount steadily until I could feel the pulse under my ears pounding and hammering in my throat.

  I remember thinking that an elderly woman whose arteries are no longer all they should be would probably prove an easy subject for strangulation, before I finally managed to pull myself together and, having removed my shoes and my outer dress, crawled into bed and, with more fortitude than one might suppose, jerked the chain which extinguished the table lamp beside me, plunging me into a blackness that took my breath away for a moment.

  Under other circumstances I think I should have slept with my light on that night, but, feeling positive the policeman outside my door had received instructions to keep a close watch upon me, I was taking no chances. It was not part of my plan to be caught red handed in the undertaking to which, after having counted the probable risk to myself and made up my mind to damn the consequences, I had positively made up my mind.

  It was just after the courthouse clock tolled once for a quarter of one that I stole out the side of my bed, taking care to avoid with my stocking feet the plank which I had noticed possessed a squeak. Inch by inch I eased up the window which looked out upon the fire escape.

  The rain had again drizzled into a thin mist. Leaning far out, I deposited on the iron landing below me the aluminium water pitcher in which I had placed my packet of greenbacks, wrapped in an old silk handkerchief. Then, drawing my purple bathrobe about me and hunching my throat deeper into the folds of my lavender fascinator, I crouched down just below the window ledge in the mist and the dark, praying to heaven that I should not sneeze at the zero hour.

  I had baited the trap; I had only to wait for a human rat to walk into it. The pocket of my bathrobe sagged under the weight of the small ugly automatic which, in a moment of aberration after a series of robberies in the city years before, I had allowed myself to buy. Not until later did it occur to me that I had no idea how to fire the thing, even if it was loaded - which to my knowledge it never had been.

  I can only say for what it’s worth that it had given me a sense of protection for years to know that the revolver was in my dresser drawer, and, now that I was coming to grips with a mad and ruthless slayer, the gun still comforted me in the illogical way women have about such matters.

  The clock tolled for one, and then the quarter and the half-hour. The tickling in my throat a
ssumed the proportion of a major obstacle. To keep from coughing required a part of my self-control, but not the major portion. It was not possible to see the water pitcher from where I huddled without lifting the top of my head and one eye above the windowsill. Having no desire to alarm my prey, I yielded to this temptation only when I could no longer by main strength resist it.

  However, I was not trusting to my eyes. With the police camping in the corridor, off which opened not only my door but the entrance to the fire escape, there remained but one approach to the water pitcher, and that by way of the fire escape itself. And while my knees and my eyes are not what they were, my ears are preternaturally keen. I did not believe so much as a mouse could climb to within a few feet of my nose without my hearing him, no matter how cautious his ascent.

  It was, as near as I can estimate, a few minutes of two when I heard the faint metallic click on the landing. Aha, I told myself, the villain approaches. In my excitement I totally forgot to be afraid – explain that if you can. Nothing at the moment mattered to me except the thrill of the chase. In fact, only my determination not to frighten my game away at the last moment enabled me during the next few minutes to keep my head down.

  As eager as a stove-up old fire horse, I crouched there, waiting for the signal to pounce. To this day I do not know if I expected my proposed victim to drop dead at sight of me or what. There are times even yet when I become slightly hysterical at the thought of what would have happened had I actually confronted that distraught and frantic creature for whom I lay in wait. But there is a destiny which watches over children and idiots, for I did not confront him.

  When next I raised my head the water pitcher was gone.

  I could not and would not believe it. I was convinced my senses or the ghostly grey fog which swirled by in tatters on the shoulders of the wind was playing me tricks. There was one terrible moment when I wondered if it was my brain which was going to pieces under the strain, when I wondered if perhaps the inspector and Stephen Lansing were right in harping upon the strange coincidence with which from the first I had seemed to be the focal point for the murders at the Hotel Richelieu. I even wondered if one who was losing her mind might in a temporary fit of madness fling a woman out a window and cut a man’s throat without, at her lucid intervals, recalling a single one of her horrible actions.

  However, after a while I threw off the hobgoblins and rose creakily to my feet. The water pitcher was gone. How and where, I had no idea, but my common sense came to my rescue in what till then had been the most desperate minute of my life. I had set the trap and a human rat had filched the bait from under my very teeth, but there was nothing weird or supernatural about the episode. I had merely been outwitted by someone far more cunning than I.

  For the first time it dawned upon me how clever the blackmailer had been in his choice of the aluminium water pitcher as a silent partner in his nefarious business. Not only were they easily come by and practically unidentifiable, being a part of the equipment of every room in the hotel, but they each had a narrow rigid handle.

  There was no other way to explain the metallic click and the way in which the pitcher had apparently taken wings and floated itself away.

  “He has a fishing tool of some kind,” I told myself bitterly, “or some sort of long rod with a hook on the end. He simply hooks the handle of the pitcher and draws it up or down or out or in, as the case may be.”

  My chagrin at the way I had been outwitted was equalled only by my, I contend, quite natural desire to get my own back. The loss of my thousand dollars was the least smart to my pride. Otherwise, my knees being what they are, the last thing I should ever have attempted was to clamber through my window and out upon the fire escape. I had some notion, I think, of peeping under drawn shades upon a malignant creature, gloatingly removing my greenbacks from my favourite silk handkerchief, which I had never intended for a cravenly blackmailer.

  I still insist, regardless of Ella Trotter’s gibes on the subject, that I should have succeeded in wriggling my rather corpulent body through the opening without too much difficulty. As I have bitterly pointed out, I must indeed have been at least halfway through for my writhing’s to have discharged the revolver in my pocket.

  Yes, it went off, as empty guns have a trick of doing at the most inopportune times. Went off with the most deafening explosion and an acrid puff of gunpowder, which promptly flew up my nostrils like a cloud of brimstone. Naturally I sneezed, went into a violent fit of coughing, and completely lost my balance.

  That is why when Stephen Lansing again bounded up the fire escape in his brocaded dressing gown it was to discover me hanging out my window by my knees, in the manner of the famous three toed sloth, upside down, with tears streaming down my cheeks as I clutched the rungs of the fire escape and indulged in a series of asthmatic wheezes, while in the pocket of my purple bathrobe a small fire blazed merrily up.

  “Good God, Miss Adelaide, make up your mind!” he gasped. “Are you trying to hang yourself? Or shoot yourself? Or burn yourself up?”

  “At-choo! Glug!” was the only response to which I was equal at the moment.

  He groaned. “One might know, Adelaide, you’d be no sissy even at suicide.”

  “Young man,” I spluttered weakly, “I only hope I haven’t killed anyone else – Atchoo!”

  He stared at me with a convulsed look on his face, and I explained crossly, “It was that dratted gun in my pocket. It went – atchoo! – it went off for no good reason.”

  At this point, with some boosting on Stephen’s part, I managed to work my way back into the room, where he joined me, continuing to stare at me very strangely while he beat out the blaze in my pocket which the gun had set off, and we both, as if by mutual consent, ignored the furious banging on the door which was the policeman Sweeney, trying to effect an entrance with, I admit, justifiable excitement.

  “Open up, or I’ll shoot the lock!” he thundered at last in what was unmistakably an ultimatum.

  Giving me a rueful glance, Stephen Lansing shrugged his shoulders, crossed the room, noiselessly turned the key, and flung the door open so suddenly Sweeney all but fell in upon his prominent beak.

  “What the...” he snarled, wildly swinging an enormous service revolver in all directions as if he were shadowboxing a whole army of criminals.

  “You two again!” he exclaimed, stopping short and staring from one to the other of us with a sour expression. “Where’s the corpse?”

  “I regret to disappoint you, but no gore has been shed, if one accepts the feathers of the old grey goose,” remarked Stephen in his suavest manner.

  “Feathers!” repeated Officer Sweeney in an exasperated voice.

  “Whatcha giving me?”

  “Feathers, feathers, everywhere, and not a lulu bird in sight,” murmured Stephen, airily pursing his lips and waving a couple of pale grey feathers into Sweeney’s outraged face.

  It was then I perceived that the bullet from my gun had found sanctuary in one of the pillows on the bed, as evidenced by a neat blackened hole in the starched slip.

  “There is only one hole,” Stephen pointed out softly. “The-er your shot, Adelaide, seems to have buried itself in down.”

  “Thank providence!” I cried devoutly.

  Officer Sweeney glared at me. “And what might you have been doing firing a shot at all?” he demanded.

  “Well,” I said tartly, “I might have been practicing for a beauty contest.”

  Patrolman Sweeney flung me an embittered glance. “Only you wasn’t,” he snapped.

  “No,” I admitted wearily, “I wasn’t.”

  “I guess you might just as well save it for the inspector,” said Sweeney. “Only I warn you, after routing him out of bed for the second night in succession you two had better make it good.”

  To say that I experienced no enthusiasm at the prospect of presenting the inspector with an explanation for my, to say the least, peculiar actions on this occasion presents an entirely inadequ
ate picture of the way I cudgelled my brain during that uncomfortable half-hour while Stephen and I waited for the inspector’s arrival.

  The turmoil had aroused everybody in the hotel, but Sweeney ordered the others back to their rooms.

  Stephen and me he marched downstairs to the lobby, practically by an ear. There he left us in charge of two gawky and extremely nervous young policemen who were, I gathered, the cubs of the force. I think Sweeney himself wanted an unobstructed opportunity to search my room. I believe he expected to find no less than two murdered bodies piled up in my closet, if not under the bed.

  Before he left us I heard him mutter to one of the fledgling cops, “If you want my opinion, she’s a werewolf, and he” – indicating Stephen – “is her pet pup.”

  “Gosh!” breathed the young policeman, his knees betraying a tendency to clash together like castanets.

  “I never had such a shock, Miss Adelaide,” said Pinky from behind the desk. “As soon as I heard the shot I was certain somebody else had been murdered, and when Clarence squalled down the elevator shaft that the disturbance was in your room I nearly fainted right on my feet.”

  I took a long breath. “As it happens, the fuss has all been for nothing, absolutely nothing, Pinky. I took my revolver to bed with me, for a precaution, as I often do,” I explained mendaciously, “and in some manner I managed in my sleep to-er-discharge a bullet into one of my pillows.”

  That was the story which I repeated firmly and without embellishment to the inspector after he came, not, I think, that he believed it for a second. However, he was unable to shake my testimony.

  I was a little shocked at the facility which I had developed for telling the most abandoned lies without a twinge of conscience, a talent which had lain dormant in my make-up for fifty-odd years, no matter what Ella Trotter has to say on the topic.

  “And you, Mr Lansing,” murmured the inspector with a jaundiced gleam in his eye, “just how did you happen to appear once more with such remarkable ease and celerity in Miss Adams’ room? Passing, it would seem, right through locked doors and windows, to say nothing of a two-hundred-pound policeman.”