The Last Express
Page 22
“I can’t say I admire your countryman,” she told him.
“My countryman!” he repeated, favoring her with his tantalizing grin. “If you’re referring to the Honorable Paul Holden, why not your countryman? You’ve lived there longer than I have. And what about the Blacks? He went to Oxford, and he and his dream of a sister were reared by the Carruthers in Kensington Gardens. I hope they make a long stay.”
Mrs. Sands glanced keenly at him, aware of some dreamy quality in his statement. It was a shock to find she was dining with an attractive youth in his early 20’s—not much older than the boys at the Winslow table. Personalities are lost in a hotel—deliberately buried in graves of fine raiment and inscrutable mannerisms.
Priding herself on her perception, she had worked for months with Thomas Fralinger and never discovered he was more than a lay figure equipped with voice to issue orders. His youth had never penetrated the hard shell of frock-coated authority which hid it from view. Under its heavy cloak he was old as Bleucher, as detached from reality and emotion.
Sadly she began to wonder if she were the same—if her own identity had merged into Doncaster House, to be lost forever. It was time to take stock when she became startled at a fellow worker’s slight show of feeling. She watched the guests with interest, but did they watch her? Was her carefully waved silver hair the adornment of an attractive woman or lifeless decoration similar to the murals on the wall?
Under stress of the question, suddenly become vital, she nearly asked Mr. Fralinger. He was staring again at the Winslow party, and the wait was too long. When she did speak it was only to say, “You’re not by any chance developing a managerial heartache over a beautiful guest, are you?”
“Rose Black?” He glanced sideways and grinned. “My dear Mrs. Colling-Sands, you surprise me! But she might be worth it at that—heartache and headache. However, I was thinking of our restaurant increase for the day and the delightful upswing of our transient list.”
“Sometimes,” said Mrs. Sands, still under the spell of musing, “I wish I were in a business where people had hearts instead of key tags. Look at the people around us, Tommy Fralinger. They live and breathe—but not to us, not to the staff of Doncaster House Hotel. An Indian potentate becomes ill and I nurse him. Not because he’s a human in distress but because he’s worth, to us, $60 a day. A visiting queen arrives, bringing with her the destiny of a nation, perhaps the fate of a troubled world. Statesmen come and go from her suite. Newspaper reporters swarm in the lobby—and Mr. Bleucher calls her ‘nine-eleven.’”
Mr. Fralinger took a menu from the waiter and smiled at her over the top before he ordered his filet of sole meunière and a salad. “A queen is always a queen to a woman. To Mr. Bleucher, who has entertained so many, a queen is just good advertising, for which the hotel pays.”
“And you and I, Tommy Fralinger, what are we?” Mrs. Sands leaned closer to him, her musical voice low.
His smile was gone and the cleft of his chin deep when he said, “Numbers too. Numbers on a payroll. Typed and marked like prisoners in for life. Unless we—”
A lull came over the dining-room conversation, noticeable as the stopping of a familiar clock. Mrs. Sands knew before she looked up that the huge bulk of Dr. Lorenzo Ynez was framed in the dining-room door.
There was always a lull when Dr. Ynez entered a room. He was a massive figure, over six feet six inches in height. Once or twice Mrs. Sands had gone so far as to hint to Bleucher that Doncaster House would be better off without his presence. As he stood in the doorway she thought of it again.
His funereal tuxedo of extreme design was heavily braided on every possible edge. A square black beard rolled halfway down his white shirt front, smudging widely a broad red ribbon of some foreign order. Lips full as Italian tomatoes peeped through his mustache and beard. They made his face seem chalky white and the blackness of his eyes seem red.
He paused the proper time to draw attention, then started for his regular table.
“Our friend Rasputin is about to make a few more conquests,” Mr. Fralinger remarked, his urbanity restored.
It was true. Dr. Ynez turned in the center of the room and headed toward the Winslow party. Paul Holden, on his feet, introduced the doctor around. Then occurred one of the incidents Mrs. Sands afterward remembered.
Baxter Winslow refused to shake hands. It resulted in the inevitable awkward pause before Dr. Ynez bowed from the waist and went on his way, and it left tension between Baxter and Paul Holden. Mrs. Sands was sure of that.
“Why doesn’t Mr. Bleucher get rid of that faker?” she asked irritably. “And please don’t call me ‘my dear Mrs.. Colling-Sands’ when you answer.”.
The assistant manager laid down his knife and fork and looked pained. “How can one be a faker and pay $30 a day for 757? You know as well as I do that he’s world famous—a psychoanalyst with the richest clientele in New York.”
“The Greeks had a word for it,” Mrs. Sands retorted, forgetting herself under his prodding. “If he’s a good doctor I never hired a maid. The kind of doctors I’ve been to don’t have nine-foot-square beds for operating tables—nor changeable lights set in the walls of a room bristling with incense pots.”
“That’s because you’ve never known the terrible worry of $100,000 a year,” he told her between mouthfuls. “Money like that makes an unattached woman nervous.”
“Well, I’m in no danger of getting either nervous or neurotic,” she assured him and let it go at that.
It was hot the following afternoon when Dryden Winslow arrived. Somehow advanced publicity gave everyone the idea he would roll up to the hotel doors in an ambulance with doctor and nurse in attendance. When Dennis, the head porter, phoned the train was in, Mrs. Sands was curious enough to make a point of staying close by the lobby.
He came in alone at 4:30; a slight, erect, white-haired man, with a face ravaged by illness. He had surprisingly little baggage for a man who had half-circled the world from Australia, coming home to die—two large trunk portmanteaus and one Gladstone bag.
Brusquely, with obvious fatigue, he asked a few questions of the clerk on duty behind the desk. “My son and daughter have arrived?”
“Yesterday, Mr. Winslow. Shall I tell them you’re here?”
“No.” He squinted against the darker coolness of the lobby, estimating furnishings from Oriental rugs to draperies with a glance. “Leave word for my daughter that I would appreciate seeing her in my suite at ten tonight.” His voice grew lower, almost trailing away.
“Are you ill, sir?” the clerk asked, instantly solicitous.
“No.” Dryden Winslow spoke with an effort. “I must rest. I’m not to be disturbed by phone or message until my daughter calls.”
Tim Bolt took him directly to 1510 and was ruinously overtipped. Doncaster House heard no more from Dryden Winslow until eight o’clock that evening, when he phoned downstairs for a Gideon Bible.
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About the Author
Baynard Kendrick (1894–1977) was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, later named a Grand Master by the organization. After returning from military service in World War I, Kendrick wrote for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective Magazine under various pseudonyms before creating the Duncan Maclain character for which he is now known. The blind detective appeared in twelve novels, several short stories, and three films.
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Copyright © 1937 by Baynard Kendrick
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