Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (5 page)

“I-er-was looking for you, Miss Adams,” he volunteered in a flat voice.

“For me?” I demanded blankly.

“This is yours, I believe.”

He fumbled in his pocket and, glancing quickly, almost furtively, I thought, over his shoulder, produced my green spectacle case.

“Well,” I said, “forevermore!”

He nodded. “I-er-found it.”

I knit my brows and then I remembered. “Near the elevator on the fourth floor?” I asked.

He nodded again. “You must have dropped it,” he stammered.

“I did,” I admitted. “Or, at least, I dropped my purse just outside Mrs Lawson’s door.”

“That’s where I picked it up,” he said quickly.

I took the green spectacle case and thrust it into my handbag.

To tell the truth I was a little wrought up over its singular appearances and disappearances. I probably stared at Mr James Reid very hard, for he began to inch away down the corridor.

“Thank you,” I called after him.

He bobbed his head and slid around the corner. Like an eel, I thought, listening for his footsteps in the front hall and hearing exactly nothing. It was then I discovered Lottie Mosby peeping through the crack in a door halfway down the corridor. Catching my eye, she closed the door swiftly, and no wonder. The Mosbys, like myself, roomed on the fourth floor. Certainly she did not belong, of all places, in the room where I had seen her. I felt slightly sick. So it was true what people intimated, I told myself. The Mosby girl was worse than indiscreet.

“Here the thing is,” I said to Lou Trotter, “though I doubt if you can do anything about it.”

She smiled faintly, wadded the knitted purse into the large shopping bag which she carried, and began hurriedly to put on her small shapeless black hat. Ella patted her arm.

“Tell Jim I’m sending him a crate of strawberries tomorrow,” she said.

That was exactly like Ella Trotter. She can exasperate you to tears, but she always ends up with a generous gesture. By the time I left Ella’s room I had nearly forgiven the way she chortled when she bluffed me out of a sound three no-trump hand that afternoon with a psychic bid of two spades when she had only the three of spades.

It is my custom to dress for dinner, though I never have more than two dinner dresses, black velvet in winter, black lace for the other seasons. I can remember when I thought that if I were ever free I would wear all the colours in the rainbow. But by the time my father died, after having been bedridden for years, I was past the age of furbelows.

As I recall, I was in the middle of my bath when I thought of the green spectacle case again. One usually thinks of things at the moment one’s in no position to do anything about them. I had a dim recollection of having absent-mindedly dropped the spectacle case into the knitted bag which Lou Trotter carried off.

“Drat it!” I muttered. “It’s all the fault of that annoying Reid man and his disconcerting habit of bobbing up in the most unexpected places with one’s personal belongings.”

It appeared to me that Mr James Reid had been in my hair all day. However, in this instance I seemed to have done him an injustice, for when I looked into my black leather purse to make sure, the spectacle case was there.

“Apparently my memory has become a bruised reed,” I told myself in chagrin.

Picking up the case, I dropped it into the drawer of the bedside table where it belonged. “Now stay there, for heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed crossly.

Mary Lawson was standing at the front of the lobby, staring out, when I came downstairs. I am sure she saw my reflection in the glass, but she did not turn around. She was drumming on the back of a chair as she had done after lunch, and suddenly I realized what was strange about her slender white hand. She was not wearing her emerald! It might not have been unusual in anyone else. Most women change their jewellery with their costume. But I had never seen Mary without the big green stone in its old-fashioned massive gold setting encrusted with diamonds. It was her engagement ring, and Mary was still passionately in love with her husband although he had been dead three years.

I had been fond of John Lawson myself. He was a fine, solid chap with all the sterling virtues. It is a pity he was killed before his time in an automobile accident during one of our infrequent sleet storms one January night. For a while I feared that Mary would never recover from the shock, but she picked up wonderfully when Polly first came to live with her. I remember thinking at the time that the girl was exactly the tonic Mary needed. Now it struck me she looked worse than ever.

“Having your emerald repaired, Mary?” I inquired casually.

She did not look around, but I heard her catch her breath. “Yes,” she said quickly. “Yes, I am.”

I had never suspected Mary Lawson of even the shadow of deceit; nevertheless, I knew she was lying. I studied her face in the glass. It looked drawn and pale. I could not understand it. John Lawson had left his widow well provided for. I happened to know that Mary depended on large annual gifts to charity to get rid of her income. It did not seem possible to me that she could be having money troubles. Other trouble I freely admitted. For at that moment Polly drove up in front of the hotel with Mr Stephen Lansing.

While Mary and I looked on, he helped the girl out of his flamboyant roadster, being very solicitous and much slower about releasing her arm than was necessary. Again I heard Mary catch her breath. Polly was gazing up into Stephen Lansing’s handsome predatory face with every evidence of complete fascination, and coming toward them down the street, looking grim and very intense, was Howard Warren. I was sure that Polly had seen him, the little minx! I felt positive that that was why she deliberately widened her eyes at Stephen Lansing in her most alluring manner.

“Darling,” she murmured, “thanks for the spin and everything.”

Of course, these young things of today call everybody darling.

I understand it is supposed to mean nothing, but it meant a great deal to Howard. He looked at Polly as if he could cheerfully have wrung her neck, and then he transferred his dark gaze to Stephen Lansing, who merely grinned.

Mary moved over to the door. “I’m waiting for you, Polly,” she called out sharply. “The Coffee Shop will be open for dinner in ten minutes.”

“Righto!” sang out Polly. “I’ll be ready in a jiffy or sooner than that.”

Her face was flushed. I supposed she had been drinking and shook my head. Howard was waiting for the elevator, but when Polly approached he turned abruptly and went up the stairs.

“Guess he figures I’m contagious; guess he’d walk miles to get away from me,” announced Polly with what might have been a giggle and could have been a sob.

The elevator creaked slowly downward and the Mosbys emerged. He looked sulky and was far from steady on his feet. She seemed to have been crying. They were pointedly not on speaking terms. He scowled when she turned the radio on full blast. There was a swing band doing its worst by the air as usual.

“Swell dance music,” murmured Lottie Mosby with a little laugh that tinkled like a lead nickel. “Anybody want to dance?” She glanced coquettishly at Stephen Lansing, who had stopped at the desk to collect his mail, but Mr Lansing ignored her as if it were someone else who had been giving her the rush only the day before. Biting her lip, she glanced away, and I saw her husband watching her in the mirror behind the cigar case. Something in his eyes gave me a start.

Cyril Fancher flung open the doors of the Coffee Shop and Sophie came out. She had a vase of flowers in her hands, intended for the desk in the lobby, and she was wearing a bright yellow lace dress which might have been becoming to a woman thirty years younger and sixty pounds lighter. I imagine I lifted my eyebrows, for Sophie threw me a defiant glance.

“Cyril adores me in yellow,” she said firmly.

I sniffed. “You are the last woman on earth, Sophie Scott, whom I should have expected to go simple in your old age.”

She bridled. One of the things neither Sophie nor her new husband could forgive me was the fact that I never was able to remember to call her Mrs Fancher.

“A woman is only as old as she feels, Adelaide,” she said tartly, “and, thanks to Cyril’s devotion, I feel gloriously young - reborn, as it were.”

“Humph!” was my only comment.

People were drifting into the dining room for, had we but known it, the last peaceful meal we were to have for days. I stopped to ask a question of Pinkney Dodge at the desk. He did not go on duty till seven, but he was usually around earlier, having nowhere else to go, poor fellow.

“Did Neilson win in the seventh at Latonia today, Pinky?” I asked.

He gave me a startled glance and said, “He didn’t even show.”

No wonder Lottie Mosby had been crying, I thought. She was the kind of silly little moth for whom the gambling fires are made.

“I didn’t know you were a race-track fan, Miss Adams,” Stephen Lansing remarked with a grin.

I looked him up and down before I addressed Pinkney.

“The hotel seems to be filled with crude people lately,” I said.

Stephen Lansing sniggered. “Ouch!” he exclaimed. “But I asked for it, didn’t I?”

Making no reply, I turned and sailed into the dining room.

Annie, the little waitress, hurried over to take my order. She seemed, for some reason, to believe that in me she had found a friend. However, I saw Cyril Fancier watching her from under his long womanish eyelashes and so I did not engage her in conversation.

It was, as I have said, the last peaceful hour under that roof for days, but nothing happened on the surface.

The Mosbys ate their dinner without exchanging a word. Polly Lawson, having made a late appearance, chattered volubly with Mary, who looked almost ill as she sat there, playing with her fork.

Howard did not come down to dinner. I suppose he was avoiding Polly and I remember thinking it would serve her right if he had a date to go out with someone else. I kept watching the elevator through the side of the Coffee Shop which is all glass. I thought Polly was also watching, but Howard was not to be seen.

Hilda Anthony appeared, wearing a brazen scarlet taffeta gown slashed to the waist in the back. As usual, she had on her outlandish artificial eyelashes, but they were becoming to her, I have to admit. She could get by with the sensational better than any woman I ever saw. Mr Stephen Lansing came in behind her and paused at her table. She shook her head when he would have sat down beside her and glanced into the lobby where Mr James Reid was staring at her fixedly from the bottom step of the stair.

“Sorry,” murmured the Anthony woman. I could not be sure but I thought she added, “Later.”

With a debonair smile the insouciant Mr Lansing moved on. I saw him stoop and pick up something at the side of the Adair table, but Kathleen Adair looked around swiftly and frowned at him, and he flushed and passed by without a word. I glanced back at the stair. The little man in grey had once more disappeared as unobtrusively as he took form. The lobby was empty except for Pinkney Dodge slumped down at the side of the desk, waiting to go on duty.

“Drat the Reid man!” I muttered for the second time that day.

“One moment he’s here, the next he’s gone up in smoke.”

Between seven and eight is the best time to find the guests of the Richelieu in. It is too early for people who have an engagement for the evening to have gone out. At that hour the lobby is full of loungers and, if the weather is at all fine, so are the big chairs on the sidewalk outside, and this was a lovely evening. My arthritis being what it is, I do not deliberately court damp spring breezes, but I did compromise by standing to the left of the front door where I could catch a breath of the night. It was, I recall, faintly perfumed with wet honeysuckle. A night for lovers, I thought, though I am not a sentimental woman.

Kathleen Adair escorted her mother to one of the divans. “I don’t suppose you’d feel up to a little walk,” she suggested and added wistfully, “It is such a beautiful evening.”

“My bronchitis, darling,” the invalid reminded her in a soft reproachful voice.

“Yes, of course you couldn’t, dear,” she said.

She made me think of a small fluttering bird I had once held in my band. It had seemed to me when I let it go that liberty is the most precious thing in the world. I had passionately wished I could as easily open the bars of my own cage.

I did not realize that Stephen Lansing had come up to her until he spoke. “Isn’t this your handkerchief, Miss Adair?” he asked.

He held out a lacy scrap. His face was quite red. For the first time he looked to me unsure of himself.

“You dropped it,” he explained lamely.

He did not say where, but I knew then what he had picked up beside the Adair table in the dining room.

“Thank you,” said the girl in curt tones.

He hesitated. “It’s too grand a night to waste indoors,” he murmured tentatively, for him almost timidly.

She flung him a scathing glance.

“I don’t imagine it will be wasted by you,” she said.

He flushed. “Wouldn’t you and your mother enjoy a little drive?” he asked.

“With you?” she demanded scornfully.

“Why not?” he inquired with a smile.

It was an attempt at his customary flippant gallantry but it failed to come off. He was suddenly not half the insolent young sheik he generally was.

“You’ve made fools of most of the women in this house, but I’m not having any,” said Kathleen Adair furiously.

He winced. “Sorry,” he stammered and walked abruptly away.

I forgot I was not officially part of the scene. “Good for you, young woman,” I said grimly. “If ever a man needed taking down, that is the man.”

To my astonishment Kathleen Adair turned on me in a temper. “It isn’t his fault if he sweeps people off their feet!” she cried.

“So that is how the land lies,” I said, shaking my head.

She coloured painfully. “I don’t know what you mean,” she protested.

I turned away in silence. I dare say any girl in her position would have denied it, yet I knew in spite of the rebuff she had handed him that the child was in love, or, I hoped, infatuated was the word, with the dashing Mr Lansing.