The door of Room 13 was open and the key was inside, as Karl had predicted. There was nothing else inside that immediately met the suspicious eye. The room was a little larger than Alma’s cubicle which I had invaded with my fishy stare. It had a few signs of pseudo-luxury not present in the garret quarters of the waitress: The wallpaper was not peeling, the scatter rug was not quite threadbare, there was a two-by-four bathroom with running water instead of the bowl and pitcher, there was a flashy red sateen spread on the three-quarters bed, and one of Jean-Gabriel Domerque’s colored etchings of a nude-cum-negligee over the Early-Grand-Rapids dresser.
The whole tawdry scene was heavy with the cheerless atmosphere of furtive, precipitate sex for sex’s sake. That such melancholy surroundings were somehow essential to catch-as-catch-can aphrodisia—“stolen moments,” as the romantics call it—seemed to me a much greater deterrent to illicit love than the solemn, graven words of the Decalogue. I wondered vaguely why the late Dr. Norman had asked for—or been assigned to—Room 13 for his last night on earth.
I poked around the room in a desultory manner without finding any signs of former tenancy. Then I went into the miniature bathroom. I found clean towels on the nickeled rack and a fine green deposit of verdigris on the enamel of the tub where the faucet had been dripping for a generation or two. But I found no toothbrush. I looked in the medicine cabinet over the washstand, and in the rickety wicker dirty-clothes hamper. I risked one hand by poking a lighted match into a dark, dank hole under the washstand where some makeshift plumbing repairs had doubtless been made with such regularity over a period of years that it had not been worth while plugging up the aperture. I came to the conclusion that one of three things must be true: either Dr. Norman had forgotten his toothbrush at home or preferred the Hindu custom of chewing twigs instead; or he had left his toothbrush behind and the chamber maid had thrown it out when she made up the room; or Karlihad been lying to me for some reason about the room Norman had occupied. Before I had weighed the alternatives against each other, I heard a footstep on the stairway outside. Instinctively I closed the door to the bathroom. An instant later I heard the door to Room 13 opening slowly. It closed again quickly.
I could hear someone breathing rapidly a few feet away on the other side of the bathroom door. He—or she—did not move for a full minute. Then there was plenty of action—brisk, almost panicky, I thought. Feet moved rapidly over the floor. Drawers were pulled out of the dresser and pushed back. The closet door was yanked open and wire hangers jangled. I heard a slapping sound, as though the rug had been rolled back and allowed to drop into place again. Casters creaked and there was a twang of bed springs. The mattress, too, was being examined. Somebody wanted to find something very badly, and apparently wasn’t getting anywhere. The bathroom would probably come next.
I stood with my ear glued to the door, pondering my own move. Should I walk out calmly and surprise the visitor? If it was the murderer, I had better be prepared for combat. And if it was McKay … But I was pretty sure it was not McKay.
While I was pondering and listening to my heart rhythm in my ears, the door to Room 13 opened again. The scurry of footsteps died, the bustle of frantic search abruptly ceased.
The ensuing silence was as thick as a Thames fog. The newcomer was obviously confronting the busy prospector who had not yet struck pay dirt. The door latch clicked. Then a pleasant, musical tenor voice said: “What are you doing here?”
It was Eddie Westerford. I decided Eddie was the prospector.
A woman giggled. Only Betty Hurley could giggle with that charmingly inane rising inflection.
“I guess I should ask you the same question,” said Betty’s voice, “except that I know what you’re doing here. You’re waiting for Jerome.”
“Yes. Where is he? Where’s your husband?”
“Jerome’s not coming,” said Betty.
“But he has to come. He promised me he’d come.”
“He thought it over and decided he couldn’t take the risk,” Betty said, and giggled again. “He sent me to tell you to pull up your socks and forget about it.”
“But I can’t. I—”
“Jerome said you’d probably be looking for something that Norman might have left here in this room. Didn’t you find it?”
“No, I can’t find anything. I’m desperate, Betty. I’ve got to see Jerome.”
“Jerome says he refuses to get mixed up in this any further.”
“But it’s too late for that. He can’t back out now.”
“Oh yes he can.”
“And if I decide to make a stink?”
“It will be your word against Jerome’s, and he’s not afraid of that. His standing will carry more weight than a—”
A hand smacked against a cheek. The resounding bop was followed by a feminine whimper, which didn’t tell me who had slapped whom.
I heard the door flung open and feet pounding on the stairs. I could not tell from the sounds whether the feet were running up or down or both, whether Betty was pursuing Eddie or vice versa, or if each had gone separate ways.
I waited a decent interval and then emerged from the bathroom. The hall door of Room 13 was still open. I went out and closed it behind me. I started down the stairs when I saw McKay and his shock troops coming out of the dining room. I held back until they had deployed onto the veranda en route to field headquarters in the bar. Then I resumed my descent.
I had barely reached the dining room floor when I was tackled around the knees by Tommy, who emerged from nowhere and immediately began shinnying up my right leg. He chinned himself on my shoulder, dropped to the ground, and executed two backward somersaults. Then he declared in a stage whisper: “Jim! I got a secret message for you. Follow me.”
I followed him, after a fashion. I did not slide down the banister of the outside stairway, nor did I hurdle the hedges on my way to the clump of willows by the lakeside which the swift and agile Tommy had chosen for our rendezvous. But I did stroll after him because so many crazy things had happened in less than twenty-four hours that I rejected nothing as impossible—not even the improbability that Tommy actually had a message for me.
When I caught up with the boy in the willows, I said: “Okay, Tommy. We haven’t been followed. You can spill it now. What’s the secret message?”
Tommy reached for the back pocket of his trousers—and his face went blank.
“Gee!” he said. “I must have lost it.”
“What did you lose, Tommy?”
“The envelope,” Tommy said. “It had the secret message in it.”
“Who gave it to you, Tommy?”
“Alma. She said I should give it to you as soon as I could. Only I couldn’t find you right away.”
“Where were you when she gave it to you?”
“In the kitchen. But I came right out in the dining room looking for you.”
“Did you talk to anybody after you got the message?”
“Sure. I was asking people if they’d seen you. I talked to a lot of people. Captain McKay said you were in jail but he was kidding. I knew he was kidding.”
“Did Captain McKay take the message away from you?”
“No. Anyhow I don’t think so. I didn’t feel anybody take it. I guess I just lost it.”
“When did Alma give it to you, Tommy?”
“About twenty minutes ago. Or thirty minutes. Not long.”
“Let’s go look for it,” I said.
We headed back for the inn, with Tommy retracing every step of his acrobatic steeplechase, looking for his lost envelope. I didn’t really need the note, because I thought I knew what it said. Alma will get word to you when she can see you alone, Karl had said. This was no doubt the word. If Tommy hadn’t been quite so careless, I would have known where and when. But the possibilities did not have such a wide range.
I left Tommy with his nose to the ground under the veranda and climbed the outside stairs to the dining room. Alma was not there. The ratty, adenoidal scullery maid was serving lunch, aided by the paunchy, puffy-eyed proprietor who tried to preserve his dignity by looking bored and slapping down plates of fried chicken in front of his guests as though he were tossing bones to a dog.
I went into the kitchen. Through a pungent blue haze of frying I saw the elderly woman with the Frau Katzenjammer topknot dropping dismembered parts of chicken into sputtering grease. Still no sign of the waitress.
“Where’s Alma?” I asked.
“Alma iss not good ge-feeling,” the woman said without looking up from her skillet. “A nose-bleeding Alma iss havving. To lying down she hass gone.”
I thanked the cook, and escaped through the dining room. I noted idly that Grace and Henry Pennington were not there, and remembered that they had not been there when I came through a few minutes earlier. It had not taken them long to finish lunch.
I stepped into the hall and walked toward the lobby, which consisted of a desk and two chairs between the outside door and the foot of the stairway. There was nobody sitting at the desk. I had covered about half the distance from the dining room when I heard someone coming down the stairs.
I stopped to listen. The tread was light and the steps hesitant, broken by frequent pauses, like an errant husband trying to make a quiet nocturnal entrance without waking his wife. I could almost hear him swearing silently at the tell-tale creak of the stairs.
I waited until I saw Bob Stewart come out of the Stairway. He did not look back, but went out directly through the front door without seeing me.
I hurried upstairs to the top floor and knocked gently on the door of Room 29. “Alma, this is Jim Lawrence.”
There was no answer. I knocked again, a little harder.
“Alma.”
Still no response.
I twisted the knob and the door swung open with a little moan. At first I thought Alma was not in the room. My eye quickly caught the familiar details of the mean little cubicle—the peeling wallpaper, the worn rug, the wash-bowl and pitcher, the chromo over the bed. Then I noticed a shapely leg hanging over the edge of the bed.
I stepped across the threshold and kicked the door shut behind me. It was two steps to the foot of the bed. I looked down at Alma Frazer and something very cold turned over slowly in my stomach. Alma was lying on her back, with her dress above her knees. One leg was folded grotesquely under her, and the other dangled off the bed. Her mouth was open in a frozen grimace of horrid surprise, and her eyes were glazed and bulging. Her face was a dark mottled purple.
I moved quickly to the side of the bed and touched her hand. It was still warm, but it wouldn’t be for long. I didn’t have to feel for her extinct pulse to know that Alma Frazer was dead.