“What happened here?” he said, his Irish accent rattling his slightly high voice.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“See-cure-ity,” he answered.
“Someone shot some holes through my door, Mr. See-cure-ity,” I said with feigned indignation. “I just called your desk and asked for the police, not the house detective.”
“Well, maybe we can handle this without calling in the poleese,” he said amiably, looking over my shoulder. “Shall we discuss this in your room instead of the hall, where we might be disturbing the other residents who are trying to sleep? Some of them are our boys in uniform on leave, who deserve a few hours of peace and quiet.”
I grunted and pushed open the door so he could get in. My experience with our boys in uniform on leave was that they were not looking for peace and quiet, but I had a role to play.
Security stepped into the room and looked around. I think he even sniffed, though I don’t know what he thought he might smell. It was all part of the act. He looked at the broken window and apparently didn’t notice the striking resemblance to Abe Lincoln.
“Look like anyone to you?” I asked.
“Does what look like anyone to me?” he said, turning his eyes to me with suspicion.
“Forget it,” I sighed and sat on the bed. He stood.
“What happened here?” he said, taking out a notebook and pencil.
“Someone shot holes in the door and almost killed me. That’s what happened. Why don’t you call the police? Seal off the hotel? I got a glimpse of the guy. About six-two, two hundred pounds, white hair cut short, real short. He had a small pistol, probably a Walther PP.”
“A Walther PP, was it?” Security said, looking over the notebook at me. “You got maybe a glimpse of this fella and you could tell what kind of weapon he had? What kind of business you in that makes you an expert on small arms?”
“I’m involved with physics,” I said. “I’m on a secret project right now with Albert Einstein. Very secret.”
He nodded his head knowingly, though I didn’t see how my answer explained how I could recognized a Walther PP in someone’s hand fifty feet down a hallway.
“I don’t know,” Irish Security said, rubbing his recently shaved and talcumed chin. “I just don’t know what to make of this. Might have been a drunk at the wrong room, or a mistake.”
He looked at the disheveled bed and around the floor. “You were in here alone, were you?”
“Of course,” I said, angrily rising from the bed and looking around for any trace of Pauline. “What are you going to do about this?”
“Remain calm,” he said, going over to the hole in the window to examine it. “Remain calm.” The window told him nothing. He sighed deeply before moving close to me to whisper, though no one else was with us.
“I can’t see that the po-leese would be much help here now. We’ll find another room for you and I’ll send my men out to go over every room, every nook and cranny in the hotel, looking for this white-haired fellow with the Walther. We’ll find him. If you’re uneasy, why, I’ll have one of my men keep an eye on your door all night. And I’m sure I can get the hotel to forget about your bill.”
He had no men and no intention of spending five minutes looking for Whitey. He’d probably give the description to the desk clerk and the doorman, and go back to listening to the radio and reading a novel in some corner of the lobby.
“Someone will watch my door?” I said, somewhat calmed.
“Every moment of the night. You have my promise,” said Security.
“Then I’ll just stay in this room and lock the door. I’m too tired to start moving things around now, it’s been a very difficult night. You sure you’ll find him?”
“Positive,” Security beamed, showing yellow false teeth. “Guaranteed. They can’t get away with that kind of thing in this hotel.”
Two minutes later he was gone. I propped a chair under the door handle and moved the bed next to the bathroom out of the line of fire. Then I got undressed, looked at my watch, which told me it was eleven, though I knew that was at least five hours from the truth, turned out the light, and got into bed. A lesser or saner man might have been worried, but I was feeling great. I had the name of the guy who had probably sent the threatening letters to Einstein, and I had someone worried enough to take shots at me. I figured the shooting had been to scare me off. Of course Security might have been right. It might have been a random drunk or lunatic or someone who had some other reason for wanting to shoot me. Or Pauline might be Pauline after all and there might be a white-haired Paul who had come looking for her. I wasn’t going to cross these possibilites off the list, but I wasn’t going to give up on my gut feeling either.
A cool draft came through the hole in the window. I looked at it before I fell asleep. It didn’t look like Abe Lincoln anymore. The magical moment had passed. A voice inside my head said, “Cowardly Pianos.” I wondered what impish game the voice was playing with me.
“Cowardly Pianos,” the voice repeated, and kept it up till I fell asleep and dreamed I was ten years old and holding my father’s hand while we stood at the edge of the desert and looked out at an endless line of yucca trees. The arms of the yucca trees trembled and I sensed they were going to reach for me. I squeezed my father’s hand and he chuckled.
“Cowardly Pianos,” he said. “They’re just Cowardly Pianos.”
5
A sour, angry screech of a note on the mad piano in my mind opened my eyes and had me grabbing my .38 on the night table and rolling onto the floor even before I knew why I was reacting. I found myself on my knees, facing the door to the room. The chair I had propped under the knob was flat on its back. The door itself had been transformed. I got off my knees and opened the unlocked door in time to see a carpenter whistle his way down the hall.
I closed the door, picked up the chair, and realized that I not only needed glasses to read with but that my animal alarm system was beginning to fail me. It was a depressing thought. The hotel had changed the door first thing in the morning, so waking guests would not be puzzled by the strangely punctuated sight as they groped their way down to breakfast. And I, every sense alert, had heard only the last hinge being clobbered in place.
I reexamined the damned hole in the window. It didn’t look like anything but a hole in the window. I put the cool handle of the .38 against my forehead and felt my stubbly face. I had things to do, but before I did them I had to answer the knock at the door behind me. “Who is it?”
“Security,” came the answer.
Before I could open the door or say “Come in,” he used his passkey and came in.
“Come in,” I said.
The talc had worn off his face. He looked tired and a lot older, but the lightweight jacket and derby hat gave him a kind of Pat O’Brien look. Or maybe Oliver Hardy would be more appropriate. “I’m going off duty now,” he said, looking at my soiled underwear and the pistol in my hand. “When I get back at midnight, I expect you to be gone, Peters.”
“I thought we were pals,” I said, reaching for my pants. “And what happened to your Irish accent? You lost it.”
“I put it back in my pocket,” he said, backing me up so I had to dance to get my second leg in my pants. “I’ll get it out the next time to impress a tourist. Now the reason we are not friends, Mr. Detective from Los Angeles, is that you did some lying to me in the early hours of this morning. Maybe it was your final April Fools’ Day joke of the night, but this is the day after and I’m feeling tired. This ship does not rock while I’m at the helm. I’ve got a police department pension and a modest income from this job. I’ve got a married daughter and three grandchildren. I’ll show you their picture.”
He pushed back his coat, pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and opened it. I had my pants on so I could stand up and take a look at the photograph he held out for me. The kids were two girls and a boy. The boy looked like “Security.”
“Nice-looking kids,
” I said, handing back the wallet and reaching for my shirt.
“Damn right,” he said, shoving the wallet deep into his rear pocket.
“Look, Security …” I started.
“Name’s Carmichael, but you don’t have to bother remembering it, because you won’t have to use it again. Just before you checked in yesterday, you tried to get our desk clerk Sudsburry to let you look at the guest register for the last month or two. Then you tell some tale about Albert Einstein being a relative.”
“I didn’t say he was a relative,” I countered, starting to button my shirt and remembering my stubbly face. “I said I was working with him, which I am, or for him on a case. I don’t know where Sudsburry got the relative bit.”
“Maybe it had something to do with relativity,” said Carmichael. “I don’t know, but this A.M. one of the cleaning crew found the guest registers for the past three months on the floor of the ladies’ room. Beginning to sound like a coincidence to you, Peters?”
I pushed the bed out of the way so I could get into the bathroom. He followed me through the door.
“A coincidence,” I agreed, squeezing some Burma-Shave out of the tube and into my palm. I was almost out of shaving cream. I’d have to remember to save the tube. Too damn many things to remember.
“Then someone decides to take target practice on your door,” Carmichael went on. In the mirror over my shoulder I could see him tilt his derby back. Maybe he was getting ready to ask, “Getting up in the world, aint ya, Rico?” I had an answer for that.
“Coincidence?” I tried as I shaved.
“A crock.” Carmichael’s right hand gripped my shoulder. He was a good sixty or sixty-five but had the grip of a beat cop who had killed many an hour doing tricks with his night-stick. “I don’t care what’s what or who’s who or why’s why. Be gone when I come back on at midnight.”
“Midnight,” I said without wincing, as I held my Marlin razor away from my face.
Carmichael let go of my aching shoulder and went out the bathroom door and out of sight. I heard the door to the room open. “Oh, and the room is still on the house,” he called. “My word is good.”
The door closed and I finished shaving. I put on my blue tie with white stripes. It was either that or the black one with the pink roses. Neither one went with my brown suit.
I ran my fingers through my hair, stood on the bed, put my .38 in the ceiling fixture, and then got down. I moved the bed back near the window and looked up. The gun didn’t show. Then I went out to breakfast.
I picked up a New York Times for three cents and took it into the restaurant coffee shop, where I ordered a stack of pancakes for a quarter and a cup of coffee. There was good news and bad news in the paper, and some I couldn’t decide on. The good news was that Pee Wee Reese got married in Daytona Beach, and General Grigorenko not only vowed that the Nazis would never take Moscow but that a Russian offensive would soon begin to drive the Germans out of Russia. The bad news was that the Japanese were moving up the Bataan Peninsula.
The bad news was that another ship had been torpedoed by Nazi subs. The good news was that a baby had been born on one of the lifeboats and was doing well.
“Look on page three, right-hand column,” came a man’s voice behind me. I turned and saw this chunky guy with a false-tooth smile, pointing over my shoulder with his chin. I turned to page three.
“Right there,” he said, inching closer. “Australia is drafting married men up to the age of thirty-five and unmarrieds up to forty-five.”
“So?”
“So?” he said. “So even if they start that here, people like you and I are safe. Some people fall between the cracks. We fell between the wars.”
“I’m forty-three,” I said.
“Hell you say,” he said, backing off. “You look …”
“And I’ve got two sons in the Pacific right now,” I added, putting down the Times and turning to face him.
“No offense, no offense,” the chunky guy said, backing off, hands up. “Just idle chatter. Got a brother in the navy myself. I got a bad ticker too.”
“And flat feet?” I asked menacingly.
“Flat feet, sure,” he said. “Four-F even if I wasn’t forty-six.”
The son-of-a-bitch was two years younger than I was. This was turning into a depressing day and it wasn’t even ten o’clock. I turned back to my coffee and paper and made my plans, while the artful dodger slipped away.
Ten minutes later I stood in front of Room 1324 and knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Alex Albanese was out. I pulled the metal band from my wallet, checked the corridor, and then went to work on the lock. Five minutes later I still wasn’t in. I was about to find another plan when a cleaning woman came down the corridor, humming “Make Believe.” I pulled out the key to my room, fumbled at the door, and dropped the key. When she was about ten feet away, I clumsily kicked the key under the door. “Damn,” I yelped, pretending not to see her.
“What you do?” she asked, halting her cart of towels.
“Can you believe it?” I said with a bitter laugh. “I kicked my key under the door.”
“I’ll let you in,” she said.
She was a rotund, tiny woman with her hair back in a bun. Her chubby fingers pulled a passkey out of her apron, and she stepped in front of me to open the door. It popped open and I reached down quickly to retrieve my key.
“Thanks,” I said, stepping in.
“Be careful with those,” she said, returning to her cart. “People pull ’em right out of your pocket, they do.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said, closing the door. And I meant to be.
6
Albanese was neat. According to the register, he had been at the Taft for almost two months. There was almost nothing in sight to show that Room 1324 was even occupied. I had been in the hotel only one night and my room was a war zone of broken doors, windows, clothes all over the place, tooth powder and shaving cream staining the sink. The one trace of an inhabitant in 1324 was a newspaper article taped to the mirror in the bathroom. The article indicated that Einstein and Paul Robeson would be performing at a benefit at the Waldorf in three days.
I checked the drawers and found out that Albanese didn’t have a gun, brass knuckles, or anything more dangerous than hotel stationery. He did have an assortment of clean clothes all neatly laid out in the drawers, most of it purchased in London. I also discovered that he wore size-32 underwear and shirts with a size-14 neck. Unless he was a Dingka tribesman, I outweighted Albanese, which gave me some comfort as I sat down to wait and continued to read my newspaper. There were a lot of plays to see with people like Eddie Cantor, Gertrude Lawrence, Danny Kaye, and Luise Rainer. Serge Koussevitsky even had the Boston Pops at Carnegie Hall a few blocks from the hotel, but what got me was the show at the Paramount in Times Square. The movie was My Favorite Blonde with Bob Hope. On stage, Tommy Dorsey, his trombone, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Rich, Ziggy Elman, Jo Stafford, and the Pied Pipers. If I didn’t get killed, I’d find time to get to the Paramount. I hummed “Moonlight on the Ganges” through twice before I heard the key in the door.
I shut up, got up, and moved into the washroom out of sight of the door. Albanese wasn’t singing when he came in. I reached over and took down the newspaper clippings. Then I quietly stood in the doorway of the bathroom and watched him walk to the window, look outside, and turn to the telephone next to the bed. He was somewhere in his twenties, thin, dark hair combed straight back. He had a thin mustache and not much of a chin. When he picked up the phone I also learned that he had an English accent, not quite Leslie Howard, but not far from it.
“Yes,” he said, “I’d like Ardmore six-five-oh-oh, please.”
I hoped I could remember the number. I couldn’t move enough to write it down and attract his attention.
“Ah,” Albanese said when someone came on the line, “Angela, would you be a good girl and cover for me? I’ll be a few minutes late for rehearsal. Tell him I had a call from my mo
ther about the Blitz or something. Blame the Jerries.… I know … Yes, you are right, no more than half an hour. Promise.”
He hung up, his back to me, and said, “Did I sound persuasive? I mean, would you have covered for me with that call?”
“Hard to say,” I said, stepping into the room and gauging a leap over the single bed in case he turned with a handful of hardware. “Women sometimes go for that helpless, spoiled-little-boy act. The accent helps too. You really English?”
“Absolutely,” he said, turning to face me. “Family from Cornwall. Father’s an apothecary, mother’s a schoolteacher. We go back a hundred years when my great-great-great-grandfather came over from Naples to peddle pornography to the few literate Anglicans.” He looked me up and down and I held up the newspaper clipping.
“I’m an actor,” he explained, moving to the wooden chair near the window and sitting to face me. The light caught him from behind. Nice effect.
“You’re also a writer,” I said, watching his hands and stepping forward. I dropped the clipping on the dresser and pulled the threatening letters to Einstein out of my pocket. No reaction. I handed him one of the letters. “You wrote that.”
He glanced at the letter and nodded with an amiable smile.
“Indeed,” he said, handing the letter back. “Normally, I don’t write with quite so steady a hand, but I wanted to be sure the camera would pick up each letter, each word. I rather saw the letters as I see my performances.”
“Why did you write them?” I asked, hovering over him.
He looked up and the smile twitched. He also turned and lost the dramatic effect of the lighting. “Didn’t Connie put you up to this? This is one of Connie’s jokes, isn’t it? I mean, you look like a gangster out of … Conrad didn’t send you, did he?”
He tried to get up but I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. The light had definitely failed him now.
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