That evening at her early dinner, Henry Irving stopped by her table and said, “Several of us who have been here for a while are having a little memorial after the theater for poor Newcome. Quite informal, and in no sense a service, but only something that can be reported to Mrs. Simmons. I do hope you’ll come, even though it will be late. In the music room. To please me?”
“Of course.”
The hotel seemed hushed at half past eleven; only a few people who had been to the theater were in the lobby. Louisa took the lift to the mezzanine and made her way toward the back of the hotel along the far corridor. There were no shops there, but rather specialized rooms for the guests—the reading room, a writing room, a billiard room, a music room. Louisa heard the piano as she neared it.
Inside, Marie Corelli was playing a large Broadwood grand—English, not American, like so much else in the hotel—and Louisa went to her as soon as she stopped.
“I didn’t know you were back!”
“Only today, chérie, and in a terrible rush at that. I’m off to Albany tomorrow. It’s exhausting but it’s necessary, yes? You look lovely.” Marie kissed her cheek. “I’m here because of that poor Newcome; I only heard about it when I got back, who’d have expected such a thing? His aunt is a very strange person, though he seemed quite pleasant. Although his sort, you know, they do stupid things when they’re on the prowl, if you follow my meaning. Are you here for the memorial? I’ve bought a mourning card for all of us to sign, and there are to be flowers. I think a contribution of twenty-five cents each would be more than generous; we don’t want to look showy.”
“Mr. Irving asked me to come.”
“I’m supposed to sing, though I don’t know anything that suits the death of a man. I suppose Gluck. Will you come to a summoning in my room?”
“For Newcome?”
“No, no, my dear, for Azul. I have the most exciting things to tell you about Azul, who almost manifested himself in my room! I’ve thought and thought about it, and I decided that Azul is afraid of presenting his awesome countenance to only one person, and so perhaps the force of several of us would persuade him to show himself. I had wanted Mrs. Simmons because she is bien spirituelle, although not of my persuasion, but it would be bad taste to ask her just now, no? One is never sure in this debased age. Tomorrow at eleven, which I know is a brutal time, but it’s the best I can manage because I have to be at the train at three. I think we’ll be six, with you, so you must come. It will be a profoundly religious experience. Oh, there’s Irving.” She waved.
There were only a dozen people in all. Cody put his head in the door and signed the card and left a dollar but went away again. Marie sang Gluck’s “Cosa Faro Senza Euridice?” which was about a dead woman, not a man, but at least the grieving singer was always a soprano. She followed it with the Dead March from Saul on the piano. Louisa’s thoughts were on the plans and notes and specifications she had read that afternoon: did they really add up to anything? Then Irving recited Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” and made it seem glorious, but of course Irving could have done the same for “Baa-Baa Black Sheep.” Then an American intoned a dreadful poem called “Thanatopsis,” with gestures, and Louisa went back to the murders and doubts of Dunne’s story that the “gigolo” had done them. A woman from Irving’s company recited the part of Ecclesiastes about there being a time for everything; and Irving ended it all with Jacques’s “seven ages of man” speech, and that was that.
Louisa limped back to her room and undressed and got into bed, but when she hadn’t fallen asleep after half an hour of frightening herself with thoughts of crawling through the walls of the hotel—there was a story about that, wasn’t there? No, it was wallpaper, crawling through the pattern on yellow wallpaper—she got up and decided to have a bath. It was after midnight; she was unlikely to meet anybody in the corridor, and the Butcher had been caught—hadn’t he? She hid herself in her flannel robe and then pulled it tightly around herself and peeked into the corridor. It was empty and silent.
Towel over her arm and soap in hand, she tiptoed quickly down to the bathroom. Normally, it should have been Ethel who drew her baths, but of course she couldn’t summon Ethel in the middle of the night. She knocked on the bathroom door, heard nothing, opened the door slowly; it was dark and silent and rather humid in there. The electric light made the wood-paneled room more cheerful. She locked and bolted the door and turned the taps.
Oceans of hot water, thank Heaven! One can’t fault Carver for that.
The room grew steamy. She tested the water with a toe, shucked herself out of the robe and sank into the blessed heat. Twenty minutes later, soaped, scrubbed, rinsed, glistening, she rose from the waves and toweled herself as the drain gurgled. It was all very comforting, rather homey. She ached to have her children in the next room to kiss.
The corridor seemed icy after the bathroom. She pulled the door closed behind her and turned toward her own room, thirty feet away. Moving toward it, she kept away from the doors as if she feared somebody’s bolting out of them.
Still fearful, Touie. Still on edge. She reminded herself that the Butcher had been caught—it could be the good-looking young man, of course it could—as had Newcome’s murderer. Dunne had performed splendidly. Even if the hotel were cursed, or at least unlucky, she had nothing to fear from it anymore—she, after all, was now safe in the annex, which wasn’t properly part of the centipede of possibly hollow walls at all. She thought of the hotel plan, the centipede, the tons of volcanic stone. Her interpretation of it seemed far fetched now—and, anyway, she was in a different building. She was safe.
But she didn’t feel safe.
She had almost reached her room when the door from the annex into the hotel opened. It was only another ten feet along, at the end of the corridor. Louisa clutched the neck of her robe and tried to hurry to her door, her key out to go into the lock.
A strange figure lurched through the hotel door. One word rang through her head: Man. But what a man!
He was tall and stooped, visibly broad in the shoulders despite a greasy, billowing robe that was spotted with drippings of old meals. He wore some sort of pajamas under the robe, the top and bottoms mismatched. His feet were bare and bulged with corns and bunions. His head was huge, ringed on the sides and back with white hair down to his jawline.
Yet it was his face that caused her to back against the wall. It was scarlet and it bulged with boil-like pustules; the nose was misshapen and swollen; the skin on the cheeks and forehead looked like badly ploughed red earth, scored with fissures in which old dirt had lodged. She thought leprosy, although she had never seen a leper.
He saw her. He smiled. The smile became a leer, showing yellow-brown teeth. He charged toward her, his balance bad, almost careering against a wall with a shoulder, then catching himself and reaching out toward her.
“Show me your titties!” He was whispering. “I’ll give you a nickel if you show me your titties! Let me see them…”
He was reaching for her. She cringed, fought him off with her left hand as she held the robe closed with her right. He was astonishingly strong for an old man; he held her wrist and twisted her arm away as the other hand reached for the top of her robe. She tried to hit him with her keys, struck his ear. She felt the fabric of the robe tear and then the front buttons popping.
“Tits! I see your tits!” He was still talking in an urgent, hoarse whisper.
She screamed.
He was trying to press himself against her. She thrust at him with her key, felt it contact flesh; she tried to kick him, aware of doors opening along the corridor, and she screamed again. He was trying to put a hand inside the robe to open it below her waist, and she tried to catch his hand and to twist away from him.
Then other people were around them. Two men in pajamas were pulling at her attacker; she yanked the robe around herself, although they must have seen her, bare to the waist. Now the old man began to scream. It was a child’s cry, high-pitched and terrified. He howled, “She hurt me! She hurt me!”
The door to the hotel opened again. Louisa was trying to get her key into the lock of her own door, but her hands were shaking so that she couldn’t do it. Galt came through, young Carver right behind him. Galt had a strait-waistcoat.
“Mr. Carver! Mr. Carver!” Galt pushed aside one of the men who had hold of the old man. “Let me deal with him—please—Mr. Carver! It’s Galt—it’s Galt, remember? Mr. Carver?—Galt, your nurse?…” He turned back to the younger Carver. “Give me the gag.”
Old Carver was still keening, making a sound that Louisa knew a rabbit made when a dog got it. Galt snatched a canvas and leather thing like a brank from young Carver’s fingers. He put it over the old man’s head; there was a lot of twisting and screaming. Young Carver joined the guests in holding his father.
By now there were half a dozen people in nightclothes in the corridor. One of them was berating young Carver for the interruption of his sleep.
Galt got the thing on the old man’s head and strapped it tight behind. It held his jaws clamped and allowed him to breathe only through his nose. As soon as it was on and tightened, the old man sagged into the arms of the men holding him, his weight so great that one of them almost let him go. Galt said, “Hold him, I’ll only be a moment now.” He slid a canvas sleeve up one of the old man’s arms with the deftness of long practice. The old man’s eyes went to Louisa. Was he smiling inside his mask?
Galt flipped the old man’s arm behind him and pushed him face first into the wall and began to work the other sleeve up his right arm.
“You can all go to bed,” young Carver was saying. “Please go to bed now. We do apologize for this unfortunate event. One of our guests from the hotel. A seizure. Of course, you won’t be charged for tonight’s stay. With the hotel’s compliments—please—please return to your beds…”
Galt was panting. He had both of the old man’s arms in the jacket now. He began to buckle straps that would hold the arms across the old man’s back. Galt said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Doyle. I don’t know how he got out. Please—when he’s like this—I know it was horrible for you. It’s my fault, of course it’s my fault—he doesn’t know what he’s doing…”
She had managed to get her key into the lock at last. She opened her door and stumbled inside. She heard young Carver say, “Mrs. Doyle, please—this was a misunderstanding—!” Then she was slamming the door and bolting it, and she leaned against it and wept.
I’m so frightened. I’m such a coward. And then, He knew me!
She wanted to get back into her bath. She wanted to soap herself, to wash every part of her he’d touched, as if he carried some contagion. That face.
She lay down on her bed and wept. She wanted somebody to help her, to hold her, but nobody came. She thought she should call the police, but the telephones were in the lobby and she would have to go into the hotel, where he was.
Gradually, as the shock faded, her weeping stopped and she was able to sit up. She felt as weak as she had in Davos. Her knees felt too watery to hold her up. Her hands were still shaking. At last, she went into her water closet and threw up. She washed herself at the small sink. She put on a thick, warm nightgown and a different robe and sat by her window in the dark, trembling.
She thought of his whispered I’ll give you a nickel if you’ll show me your titties. Had he really said that to children? To young girls? Is that what he’d done in his hotel, too—spied on the female guests? Ever since it was built?
And had he known her—because he’d spied on her? Stolen her soiled drawers?
She thought of what she’d learned in his office that afternoon. None of it seemed ridiculous now. He must have planned the hollow walls from the beginning. The architect must never have understood what old Carver was really about. Not, at any rate, until the hotel had been half finished and they had poured the crushed rock.
And then, did Carver kill him? Push him off the roof at night? And take a photograph of the corpse in the morning?
She shuddered. Was there still more to it? Had the old man found murder to his liking? Had he watched the French maid making love to her mistress’s husband and then killed her? Had he watched the copper-haired woman making love to her lover and then murdered her?
But what of the other killings? Suppose the young “gigolo” hadn’t done them. Suppose…
***
A single figure walked along the pavement of one of the finer streets in Brooklyn Heights. He walked slowly, like a man with a burden, and when he came to his destination, he slowed, then stopped, might have been prepared to turn back, but after several seconds he went up the steps of a brownstone and rang the bell. Late as it was, there were footsteps in the house; an electric light went on over the door; the door opened.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Grady tried to make his voice bright. “Agh, I couldn’t sleep, Jack, thinking of you and me. I thought I’d chew over our difficulties together. Brothers in arms, like.”
Cleary stared out at him. He needed a shave; he wasn’t wearing a necktie and his waistcoat was unbuttoned; he smelled of whiskey. Grady drew a pint from his pocket. “I brought some of the Irish.”
“I got my own.” Nonetheless, Cleary held the door, and Grady went in. He followed his lieutenant along a corridor to the back of the house and into a sordid “den” that needed cleaning. “I’ve never been here before,” Grady said, as if he had just realized it.
“No reason to.” Cleary threw himself back into a chair. A mostly empty bottle and glass were at hand. “Drink your own. Whaddayou want?”
“Just thought we could both use some cheering up.”
“Christ on a crutch, you think we’d come to each other for cheer?” Cleary poured from the bottle into his own glass. As if reminded, he said, “Glasses in that tall thing against the wall.” He lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking. “Not as if we was pals, Grady.”
“Comrades in arms.”
Cleary gave a derisive sound that might have been a cough.
Grady had one hand in his overcoat pocket. He was sweating like a coal-heaver; any second now, Cleary would smell it on him. Cleary was no fool. Better to get it over with. “Well…” he said.
Cleary turned his head aside to tap cigarette ash into a dirty saucer. Grady pulled a revolver from his overcoat pocket. When he cocked the hammer, Cleary heard it and turned, an expression of astonishment on his face. But the chair was too deep for him to get out of quickly.
***
“I am very sorry, Mr. Carver, but if you do not call the police, I will.”
“Please, Mrs. Doyle! He’s all right now; the doctor gave him—”
“I don’t care what the doctor’s done! Your father committed a horrible, a…a despicable act against me! Heaven knows how many other women he’s done the same to or worse. Mr. Carver, your father is wicked!”
“No, no—”
“What would you call him, then? He ripped open my robe!”
“He’s old, Mrs. Doyle. He’s senile.” They were in young Carver’s office. It was barely eight in the morning. Louisa, sleepless but determined to pull herself out of her funk by striking back, had put her loaded revolver in her rear pocket and marched down to beard Carver before she even had breakfast. Carver was almost in tears. “He’s harmless.”
Louisa, who had spent the night in tears herself and was now beyond them, looked down at him—she was standing, he was sitting—as the statue of Athena might have looked down on a particularly worthless Athenian. “Harmless? Mr. Carver, your father may be the Bowery Butcher.”
“NO! Oh, dear God, don’t say such a thing! They’ve caught the Butcher; it’s in all the papers. My father isn’t like that. He just wants to…look—do you understand? It’s always been his…failing. He had to leave Pittsburgh because of it. When he came here, I thought he’d reform. He threw himself into building the hotel. I thought he’d turned over a new leaf.”
“And instead he was building a bespoke peep show for himself.”
His mouth actually fell open, but at once his eyes got shifty and she knew she’d said something she shouldn’t have. Yet she went on. “And you knew, didn’t you? About the passages and the ‘deluxe closets’ that were really secret doors for him to go into rooms and—”
“He hasn’t done it in years! Please, please, don’t say it! It would ruin us. And I didn’t know, not for years and years—!”
“What do I care about you? What about me? What about all the women he’s spied on over the years?”
“But it’s only looking.”
Louisa dropped her voice. “‘Only looking.’ Or do you mean ‘Only women’?”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, looking is…is…it isn’t physical harm.”
“It’s a crime. It’s an insult!”
“Not a serious one.”
“But it is a crime! And that’s why I intend to telephone the police.”
“You can’t!” He looked as if he would stop her physically, then softened, cringed. “You mustn’t. Look, Mrs. Doyle, we’ll come to an arrangement. I’ll pay you for your, what, suffering, and your…your embarrassment, your—”
“Try terror, Mr. Carver.”
“Well, yes, I understand, of course. And you deserve compensation. Unquestionably. We can settle this between ourselves. Or between our lawyers; see? I’m entirely willing for you to bring in your lawyers.”
“I’m overcome by your generosity. Mr. Carver, I have been harmed.”
“Well, in a manner of speaking, yes, but—”
“In the manner of speaking of the law, Mr. Carver. That is the law’s word, ‘harm.’ And the law’s response to harm is to make whole. I was stripped naked to the waist by your father in front of not only him but at least six other men. Including you. What will make me whole is going to the police and seeing your father put where he can never harm a woman again.”
“You can’t.”
“Can and will.”
Tears started running down Carver’s face. “Mrs. Doyle—he’s my father.”
Astonishingly to her, she was moved. She was sure she despised Carver; he was a snake and a coward and, for all she knew, he shared his father’s vice. But in the way he had said “father,” he had been sincere. She said, “I’ll give you until noon to find a private asylum that will lock him away.”
“He’s locked away already.”
“And look what happened! Where was Galt? Probably asleep—do you really think that one man could keep watch all the time? Your father is strong, Mr. Carver. And I’m not entirely persuaded that he’s senile. I am absolutely certain, however, that he is dangerous.” She pushed her walking-stick into the carpet and straightened. “Twelve o’clock. If your father is not out of the hotel and locked up somewhere by then, I will call the police. Then I will go to my husband’s lawyers and tell them to sue you for the value of the hotel.”
He was blubbering. “They’ll put him in Ward’s Island!” To his credit, he for once didn’t mention the hotel.
“I don’t know what that may be, nor do I care. I dare say you can afford some private asylum.”
He moaned. “We can’t, we can’t…” He actually wept. “We’re broke.”
She went straight to the restaurant and tried to eat her table d’hôte breakfast. The false energy of her confrontation with Carver quickly faded, however; she found she had no appetite. Her back ached between her shoulder blades; her whole body seemed to have a poor grasp of how to move, how to balance. Her head ached.
She drank tea and ate part of a single piece of dry toast.
Minutes later, she was in her room. She had asked Reception to ring for Ethel. The truth was, she didn’t need Ethel: she wanted another human being.
Without beating about the bush, she said, “What would you think, Ethel, of going back to England?”
“Oh, I’d be very pleased to, madame! But wouldn’t Mr. Doyle, mmm…?”
“I would explain to Mr. Doyle. The truth is, I think I’ve had enough of New York.” By which she meant of this hotel.
“Yes, madame. But isn’t it quite expensive?” This was Ethel’s way of saying that she knew that Louisa was out of money.
“I’ve taken care of that.”
“Well, then. You’d like to see your little ones, I dare say.” Ethel was looking into the bureau drawers—doing her job, in fact. “I think if we’re going anywhere, we should have our laundry done, madame.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea.”
“And some pressing of our dresses. Should I tell them to bring the dresser trunk from the lumber room, madame?”
“Oh—it takes up so much space—still…” She thought that Ethel was rushing her fences a bit. “Is something wrong, Ethel?”
“Not at all, madame. I simply thought that if we’re going, there’s a great deal to do.” She was piling dresses on the bed and starting to go over them for repairs. “There is something I should tell you, I suppose.” She gave Louisa a quick look. “I’ve given Mr. Galt his walking papers.”
“Oh, dear, what happened?”
“He made advances.” She sniffed. “He tried to put his arm around me when we were walking out.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Ethel. But…” She thought of her own experience of the night. “Putting an arm around you doesn’t seem so very bad.”
“It’s the thin end of the wedge, if you take my meaning. I told him I didn’t put up with that sort of thing and I had no intention of it being that kind of arrangement. He was quite sheepish about it.” She said that with a good deal of satisfaction. At that moment, Ethel reminded Louisa of the women who had taught her at the teachers’ training college. “It would serve him right if I set sail for England.”
“Perhaps he’ll apologize.”
“He already has. Very nicely, too. In writing.” She sounded more and more satisfied. Abruptly, she whisked some clothes off the bed. “I’ll just take these upstairs and mend them, if you don’t mind. All my sewing things are up there, and there’s no room here.”
And you have friends up there and human companionship, you lucky woman.
“Of course. Off you go, then.”
Louisa wandered out into the lobby. She thought she might find Mrs. Simmons there, could say something sympathetic to the old woman about her nephew. She wasn’t there, however. Manion was, sitting in his usual place; he gave her the look of a hurt cow; she tried the smallest smile she knew and turned away. She’d had enough of him and of men—especially men who exercised an attraction despite herself.
“Any messages for Doyle?”
“Nothing, sorry.”
One of the boys brought her the morning papers. Only a piece on an inside page cut through her funk:
Suicide of a Disgraced Policeman
Lieutenant John Cleary, recently of the Murder Squad of the Municipal Police, was found in his home last night, apparently dead by his own hand. With him was Sergeant Peter Grady, who found the body. “I had just stepped out of the room. I heard the shot, and when I ran in, there he was on the floor.”
Cleary and Grady were both under suspension for suspicion of corruption. “It must have been too much for him,” said Deputy Chief F. X. Halloran. “The newspapers have hounded this poor officer to his death.”
Investigating officers of the Brooklyn Municipal Police say there is no question of foul play…
Louisa didn’t finish reading. Cleary and Grady seemed unreal to her now.
At nine, Marie Corelli came down and headed straight for the restaurant. Louisa hobbled after her and asked if she could sit with her.
“Of course, my dear! Sit, do sit, you look simply awful. I don’t mean that; you look pretty, as always, but you look so ravaged. What has happened?”
She thought she would say, “Nothing,” but instead poured out the story of the night’s horror. It came in a gush, Marie wide-eyed opposite her, nibbling little bites of toast and nodding her head and saying things like, “Ah, these men!” By the time she had finished, Louisa found that she, too, was eating toast. In fact, she was ravenous.
“He really said, ‘Show me your bosom’?”
“Well…he was more vulgar than that.”
“What did he say? Breasts? Quel horreur.” Marie finished the last of the jam on her plate, licking the spoon afterward. “I, too, have had an adventure, as I hinted last night, though not one so outré as yours, poor thing.” She leaned across the table, whispered, “Almost a visitation from Azul!” And with great excitement, she told Louisa about hearing sounds from the corner of her room, then the bumping next to the fireplace. “It was he—Azul! But he did not quite break through the barrier.”
Louisa didn’t have the heart to tell her it must have been old Carver. All she could say was, “This is a terrible place.”
“Not at all! It is a unique place.” Marie dusted her fingers together to get rid of the crumbs. “Come upstairs with me while I dress, why don’t you? I will show you where it happened. You’ve had a fright; you need to talk. And do come to my summoning, won’t you? I can feel that I’m very close now.”
Louisa still had more than two hours before her promise to Carver—an unwise one, she thought—ran out. Several men were standing at the desk; as she passed, she recognized two of them from the horror of the night before. She flushed and turned her head away: they had seen her breasts. She imagined jokes, nudges. But no, they were looking away from her.
“Do you like men?” she asked as they went up in the lift.
“Not a great deal.”
“But do you like them? As friends, I mean.”
“One cannot be friends with men.” Marie frowned at the boy who was piloting the lift. “I have to agree with Mrs. Woodhull on that score—for whom I perhaps owe you an apology, my dear. She was very harsh with you that day at lunch. I had hoped you would like each other.”
“I don’t think it was a question of that.”
“Not that she and I ‘like’ each other, either. I seldom see her; rather, we’re epistolary friends. I think that one should have a serious correspondent or two, don’t you? And she is serious! Perhaps too much so for you.” The lift stopped. “At last.”
Marie’s sitting room was chaos. The oak table that Marie had told her about had been pulled away from the wall, and luggage and books and the remains of a meal were piled on it. Every lamp had a silk scarf either draped over it or lying next to it. Clothes were everywhere.
“The bonne hasn’t cleaned yet,” Marie said. An understatement to Louisa, accustomed to Ethel’s neatness. Marie turned on a lamp that had a scarf over it and said, “What d’you think? The right effect? For the summoning, you know. It is all for the participants, not for Azul—what would Azul care about lights? Azul is light!”
“Oh, it’s quite nice.”
Marie went around, unbuttoning the back of her dress and turning lights on and off. When she was down to one again, she said, “One light? With the green scarf?” She picked up something from the oak table as if she meant to start cleaning, then dropped it. “The housekeeper insists that they will have the room cleaned by half-ten. I sincerely hope so! I shall be out until then or a few minutes later, and the summoning is at eleven!”
Louisa was standing next to the fireplace. Now that the table had been moved, the wall there was accessible. “Is this where you heard the noises?” She began to feel over the panel for a crack that would reveal a door. It had occurred to her that when she called the police, her story would be more believable if she could actually lead them to an entrance into the tunnels or passages or whatever they were. If they existed.
Marie had gone into the bedroom, now put her head out the door but kept the rest of herself, except for one bare shoulder, out of sight. “That’s where I felt Azul’s strength. As if he were pushing to make himself visible. It must be the devil’s own fight, you know, breaking through the barrier from infinity into reality.”
Louisa felt all over that part of the wall but found nothing. It was paneled, like the same section on the other side of the fireplace and like the rest of the sitting room. The paneling was carved in rectangles made of simple bevels with a raised molding around them. It was possible, she supposed, that the molding hid the edges of an opening, but she couldn’t get her fingernails under it to find out. Nothing felt loose; nothing gave when she pushed.
Marie came back wearing a silk kimono and smoking a cigarette. Louisa said, “You felt you were being watched, you said.”
“I knew I was being watched, chère.” She pointed up into a corner of the room. “Up there—I could feel rays of divinity coming from up there. Want a cigarette?”
“Oh, no, thanks. Yes! Yes, I will. For my nerves.” She went to the corner and looked up. A dentillated wood cornice ran all the way around the room. It all looked as solid as the trees it had come from. Still, she thought she might see something if she could get up there and really look.
Marie handed her a lighted cigarette. “What are you looking at, my dear?”
“If I could stand on a chair, I might have a better look up there.”
“Stand on a chair—are you mad? You just broke your ankle! Come over here and sit down. Please, my dear. Stand on a chair, indeed!”
But Louisa wasn’t listening. She was looking at Marie’s room key, which she had tossed down on a table next to the chair in which she’d now seated Louisa. Marie went off to the bedroom again; Louisa puffed once on her cigarette, held it in her mouth, and whipped from her pocket the key that had opened Carver’s office. She put it over Marie’s key. They were identical in size, but the key from Carver’s office had extra cuts and indentations in it.
Wasn’t there something called a skeleton key?
It took her thirty seconds to find out.
There was.
“Not going, I hope, my dear.” Marie was back in the sitting room. “I need you to help me get into a corset. Do you mind?”
Of course she didn’t mind, but it occurred to her that it was time that Marie got herself a lady’s maid. When she suggested it—Marie was displaying a formidable pair of breasts, holding up some flimsy French garment that would soon cover them—Marie said, “In Paris, my companion dresses me. We are companions of many years.” Her eyes met Louisa’s; Marie smiled, hesitated, said, “Eh, bien,” and turned away. “The corset, if you please.”
***
In her own room again, Louisa thought about the skeleton key and Marie’s wall. Marie was going to be out until almost eleven, she said, but of course she’d be later than that because she was always late. There would be time to go into her room and look at that wall again.
Louisa had convinced herself that she would have to have proof that passages ran through the walls of the hotel. Suppose, for example, the men who had seen old Carver attack her last night had all left the hotel, taken trains? Hadn’t Ethel said they were mostly traveling men in the annex? Suppose young Carver had threatened Galt with something terrible unless he denied that any of it had happened? Suppose Louisa were to have no proof but what she could supply herself? She would most certainly call Detective-Sergeant Dunne at noon (or sooner), but Dunne would want facts. She didn’t want him saying that she was again too much at the center of things.
A knock sounded on her door. She felt a stab of fear, conquered it. “Yes—who is it?”
“It’s Galt, Mrs. Doyle.”
She hesitated. At that moment, she didn’t trust anyone—not any man, at any rate. And Ethel had given him his walking papers; might he be resentful? She said, “What is it, Mr. Galt?”
His voice was a little muffled by the door. “I only wanted to say how sorry…how ashamed I am about last night.”
She made sure the gun was in her pocket and kept her hand on it as she opened the door. He moved back half a step and said, “I won’t come in. I just feel that what happened was terrible for you.”
“Mr. Galt, will you tell that to the police if I call them?”
“Indeed I will! Though it was my fault, him getting out.”
She opened the door wider. “I’m sure it wasn’t. You can’t be everywhere, and you have to have your sleep.” She lowered her voice. “And I think old Mr. Carver knows ways to get about the hotel that you don’t.”
He stared at her rather stupidly. She said, “He’s been spying on at least one guest that I know of—Miss Corelli. I’m going to look in Miss Corelli’s rooms to see how he does it.”
“I don’t think he can be doing anything like that. It’s just that last night, he got away from me.”
He was looking doubtful, maybe frightened. She said, “I’ve told Mr. Carver—the young one—I’d give him until noon before I call the police about last night. I mean to tell them everything.”
He backed away another half-step and held up a hand. “I was hoping you might, well… You know Miss Grimstead’s been walking out with me. I thought…as her and I had an unfortunate misunderstanding…you might, maybe, put in a word for me.” He got almost agitated and waved a hand as if shushing her. “Nothing personal! Nothing I mean that she’d see as interfering, but only…” He looked helpless. “I’m not such a bad fellow, Mrs. Doyle.”
The triviality, the banality of it, made her impatient with him. She muttered, “Of course. I’ll see what I can do. Thank you for coming by, Mr. Galt.” She closed the door.
She thought frankly that he had a lot of cheek—as if she would interfere in something going on between her maid and a man. But that was unimportant; what was important was getting facts before noon.
She made sure that she had the skeleton key, and she took the hotel’s letter opener from the desk in case she found something she wanted to pry open. She would have forgotten the revolver, but it was already in her pocket, and she felt the weight of it as she went out. It seemed now ridiculous to her that she was carrying a gun, an actual gun. Marion McCousins had made it quite clear that she was all but useless in trying to shoot it. Still, it would be silly to own it and not carry it. The gun stayed in her pocket next to her bustle.
It was twenty minutes before eleven. In a little more than an hour, she would see to it that justice was done to old Carver.
***
She had crossed the lobby and got into the lift when she saw movement out among the leather chairs. It was Manion. He was getting out of his chair, looking at her, hesitating. Abruptly, he sat down again. The lift doors closed.
“Third floor watcher step please.”
She pushed herself forward on her stick, stepped out of the car on Marie’s floor.
“Going down please.”
The gates clashed. She limped to her right. The corridor was much finer than the one in the annex; here were good carpets, little lights in bronze sconces, vaguely good paintings and a statue or two. At the corner where she turned to get to Marie’s room was a curtained alcove with two armchairs and a table in it, a little stage set that she supposed nobody used.
She limped to Marie’s door. Her heart was beating too fast. She could feel weakness in her knees, like the weakness there of sex, like the weakness of the phthisis. And fear, now never far away.
She knocked, in case the maids were still cleaning. She put the skeleton key in the lock and it turned and the door fell open a few inches.
The room felt unsafe at first. There was no reason it should seem so except that the curtains were drawn and it was in semi-darkness. Marie’s mess had disappeared from the heavy table. The odor of her cigarettes and her scent were still in the air. The odors of furniture polish and soap now lay over them.
Get it over with, Louisa. Do it and get out and call the police. And damn being frightened. And damn this place.
She opened the drapes; cold, silvery light poured in. That was better. She put on two of the electric lamps; the light got warmer, safer.
She felt around the molding by the fireplace again and tried to slip the point of the letter opener under it, but it wouldn’t go. If the molding hid a door, it did so expertly, the work of a skilled craftsman.
She looked up into the corner where “Azul” had first made his noises. A peephole up there? Perhaps hidden in one of the dentillations? She lifted one of the lamps to get more light, but she could still see nothing. She looked around for something to climb on and rejected the rather feminine gilt chairs because she was short and so were they. Even standing on one, she wouldn’t have had her eyes level with the cornice.
Beyond the bedroom door was a slant-top desk with drawers below, rather narrow and quite delicate-looking. Still, when she rocked it, it felt sturdy. Could she move it? She could try.
After two pushes that moved it only a few inches over the carpet, she took out the drawers, lightening it. Then she pulled two prayer rugs out of the path and rolled the carpet—imitation Shiraz, but good—back and knelt so that she could lift the desk half an inch with one hand while she pulled the carpet from under the caster with the other. Another lift, another tug, and the left-hand casters were on bare wood floor. It was easy then to free the others and roll it across the room and position it in the corner, then little more effort to carry one of the gold chairs to set it with its back to the desk so that she had a kind of stair—chair seat, desk surface, top. But, easy as it might have been, she was breathing hard and, of all things, perspiring. Ladies do not perspire. The teachers’ college…
She debated taking the letter opener. Falling off the desk with it in her hand would be dangerous. Better to lay it on the top where she could get it if she needed it, although the idea of bending while standing up there, her front flat against the wall, was dizzying.
She placed the letter opener, then leaned her cane in the corner of the room.
She lifted her skirts and raised her right foot to the chair seat. The next movement, she knew, was going to hurt: she would have to put her weight on her bad ankle. She turned and tried to transfer some of the weight to her hands on the chairback; pain still shot through the ankle as she raised herself.
Dear heaven, it seemed a long way up! She could lean a knee against the chairback and put her left foot on the desk’s surface, then lean still farther forward and grasp the extended edges of the top to pull herself up. But then the wall rose above her to the cornice like a cliff. She could look up into the dentillations but see no more than she had from the floor. The cornice was still two feet above her. The only thing for it was to step up to the top of the desk. Without anything to hold on to or take her weight.
She balanced with her fingertips on the top and then raised herself on her left foot. When she had to let go, she felt a momentary swaying backward, then got her hands flat against the papered wall and clung there as if she had suction-cup fingers. Her heart was beating like a warning. But she had to go on, because her weight was on her bent left leg and the leg was starting to shake.
Up she went, feeling her left thigh muscles try to lock and refuse to go on; on she went until her left leg was straight and she could slide her right foot and stand there very straight, like a child learning posture, with her hands spread against the wall. Thinking, How will I ever get down?
The cornice was inches from her face. She tilted her head back without changing her balance, then slid her hands up the wall until they touched the dentillations and she could slowly, painfully, take a dentillation between each thumb and forefinger and so give herself the illusion of holding on.
At first she saw nothing. Then she saw, just above the complex molding that formed the bottom of the cornice, a line. And then, she saw that the line, itself only a few inches long, finished at each end in a vertical line that ran up to the junction where a dentillation poked forward from the background.
A little flap. Or a tiny door.
Now that she had found it, she was sorry. Now she would have to go on.
She crawled her right hand to the left like a five-fingered spider, trying to hold a dentillation with the other hand as she did so, failing, pressing herself tight against the wall. The fingers reached the lines. She got her index and third fingers beyond the dentillation and pushed.
Her fingertips went in.
A section of wood as big as a matchbox swung up. She looked in.
And saw a pair of human eyes looking out.
She screamed, and then she was twisting and falling, and the weight came on her bad ankle and it collapsed and she was falling backward, feeling her right thigh strike the chair, and then her head hit the floor and she felt the blow as a flash of light and a stopping of everything.
***
Sergeant Cassidy came toward Dunne’s desk at Mulberry Street and waved a yellow envelope. “You got a telegram.”
“Oh, Jeez, what now.” Dunne, his eyes baggy with fatigue, took it and rather expertly ripped off the end and extracted the message. He read it, grunted, looked up at Cassidy.
“The Doyle woman was right—it’s the hotel.” He waved the telegram. “From Pittsburgh. The old man—four complaints, one arrest. He’s a Peeping Tom.” He got up and reached for his coat, then bent to take a revolver from a drawer. “Let’s go.”
“You want I should call a carriage?”
“I wanna get there today. We’ll take the El.”
***
Louisa rolled on her back. She wanted somebody to help her up. Everything had been knocked out of her—her breath, her heartbeat, her vision. She had lost contact with the world. Where was she? And why—?
She looked up. Somebody was bending over her. He was whispering to her.
“You stupid cunt!”
It was Galt.