Steve Grayce said: “Huh.” He scooped the torn pieces into a hotel envelope, put that in his inside breast pocket and lit a cigarette. “The guy had guts,” he said. “I’ll grant him that— and his trumpet.”
He locked the room, listened a moment in the now silent corridor, then went along to the room occupied by the two girls. He knocked softly and put his ear to the panel. A chair squeaked and feet came towards the door.
“What is it?” The girl’s voice was cool, wide awake. It was not the blonde’s voice.
“The house man. Can I speak to you a minute?”
“You’re speaking to me.”
“Without the door between, lady.”
“You’ve got the passkey. Help yourself.” The steps went away. He unlocked the door with his master key, stepped quietly inside, and shut jt. There was a dim light in a lamp with a shirred shade on the desk. On the bed the blonde snored heavily, one hand clutched in her briiliant metallic hair. The black-haired girl sat in the chair by the window, her legs crossed at right angles like a man’s and stared at Steve emptily.
He went close to her and pointed to the long tear in her pajama leg. He said softly: “You’re not sick. You were not drunk. That tear was done a long time ago. What’s the racket? A shakedown on the King?”
The girl stared at him coolly, puffed at a cigarette and said nothing.
“He checked out,” Steve said. “Nothing doing in that direction now, sister.” He watched her like a hawk, his black eyes hard and steady on her face.
“Aw, you house dicks make me sick!” the girl said with sudden anger. She surged to her feet and went past him into the bathroom, shut and locked the door.
Steve shrugged and felt the pulse of the girl asleep in the bed—a thumpy, draggy pulse, a liquor pulse.
“Poor damn hustlers,” he said under his breath.
He looked at a large purple bag that lay on the bureau, lifted it idly and let it fall. His face stiffened again. The bag made a heavy sound on the glass top, as if there were a lump of lead inside it. He snapped it open quickly and plunged a hand in. His fingers touched the cold metal of a gun. He opened the bag wide and stared down into it at a small .25 automatic. A scrap of white paper caught his eye. He fished it out and held it to the light—a rent receipt with a name and address. He stuffed it into his pocket, closed the bag and was standing by the window when the girl came out of the bathroom.
“Hell, are you still haunting me?” she snapped. “You know what happens to hotel dicks that master-key their way into ladies’ bedrooms at night?”
Steve said loosely: “Yeah. They get in trouble. They might even get shot at.”
The girl’s face became set, but her eyes crawled sideways and looked at the purple bag. Steve looked at her. “Know Leopardi in Frisco?” he asked. “He hasn’t played here in two years. Then he was just a trumpet player in Vane Utigore’s band— a cheap outfit.”
The girl curled her lip, went past him and sat down by the window again. Her face was white, stiff. She said dully: “Blossom did. That’s Blossom on the bed.”
“Know he was coming to this hotel tonight?”
“What makes it your business?”
“I can’t figure him coming here at all,” Steve said. “This is a quiet place. So I can’t figure anybody coming here to put the bite on him.”
“Go somewhere else and figure. I need sleep.”
Steve said: “Good night, sweetheart—and keep your door locked.”
A thin man with thin blond hair and thin face was standing by the desk, tapping on the marble with thin fingers. Millar was still behind the desk and he still looked white and scared. The thin man wore a dark gray suit with a scarf inside the collar of the coat. He had a look of having just got up. He turned seagreen eyes slowly on Steve as he got out of the elevator, waited for him to come up to the desk and throw a tabbed key on it.
Steve said: “Leopardi’s key, George. There’s a busted mirror in his room and the carpet has his dinner on it—mostly Scotch.” He turned to the thin man.
“You want to see me, Mr. Peters?”
“What happened, Grayce?” The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to.
“Leopardi and two of his boys were on Eight, the rest of the gang on Five. The bunch on Five went to bed. A couple of obvious hustlers managed to get themselves registered just two rooms from Leopardi. They managed to contact him and everybody was having a lot of nice noisy fun out in the hall. I could only stop it by getting a little tough.”
“There’s blood on your cheek,” Peters said coldly. “Wipe it off.”
Steve scratched at his cheek with a handkerchief. The thin thread of blood had dried. “I got the girls tucked away in their room,” he said. “The two stooges took the hint and holed up, but Leopardi still thought the guests wanted to hear trombone music. I threatened to wrap it around his neck and he beaned me with it. I slapped him open-handed and he pulled a gun and took a shot at me. Here’s the gun.”
He took the .32 automatic out of his pocket and laid it on the desk. He put the used shell beside it. “So I beat some sense into him and threw him out,” he added.
Peters tapped on the marble. “Your usual tact seems to have been well in evidence.”
Steve stared at him. “He shot at me,” he repeated quietly. “With a gun. This gun. I’m tender to bullets. He missed, but suppose he hadn’t? I like my stomach the way it is, with just one way in and one way out.”
Peters narrowed his tawny eyebrows. He said very politely: “We have you down on the payroll here as a nightclerk, because we don’t like the name house detective. But neither night clerks nor house detectives put guests out of the hotel without consulting me. Not ever, Mr. Grayce.”
Steve said: “The guy shot at me, pal. With a gun. Catch on? I don’t have to take that without a kickback, do I?” His face was a little white.
Peters said: “Another point for your consideration. The controlling interest in this hotel is owned by Mr. Halsey G. Walters. Mr. Walters also owns the Club Shalotte, where King Leopardi is opening on Wednesday night. And that, Mr. Grayce, is why Leopardi was good enough to give us his business. Can you think of anything else I should like to say to you?”
“Yeah. I’m canned,” Steve said mirthlessly.
“Very correct, Mr. Grayce. Goodnight, Mr. Grayce.”
The thin blond man moved to the elevator and the night porter took him up.
Steve looked at Millar.
“Jumbo Walters, huh?” he said softly. “A tough, smart guy. Much too smart to think this dump and the Club Shalotte belong to the same sort of customers. Did Peters write Leopardi to come here?”
“I guess he did, Steve.” Millar’s voice was low and gloomy.
“Then why wasn’t he put in a tower suite with a private balcony to dance on, at twenty-eight bucks a day? Why was he put on a medium-priced transient floor? And why did Quillan let those girls get so close to him?”
Millar pulled at his black mustache. “Tight with money— as well as with Scotch, I suppose. As to the girls, I don’t know.”
Steve slapped the counter open-handed. “Well, I’m canned, for not letting a drunken heel make a parlor house and a shooting gallery out of the eighth floor. Nuts! Well, I’ll miss the joint at that.”
“I’ll miss you too, Steve,” Millar said gently. “But not for a week. I take a week off starting tomorrow. My brother has a cabin at Crestline.”
“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Steve said absently. He opened and closed his fist on the marble desk top.
“He doesn’t come into town much. A big guy. Used to be a fighter.”
Steve nodded and straightened from the counter. “Well, I might as well finish out the night,” he said. “On my back. Put this gun away somewhere, George.”
He grinned coldly and walked away, down the steps into the dim main lobby and across to the room where the radio was. He punched the pillows into shape on the pale green davenport, then suddenly reached into his pocket and took out the scrap of white paper he had lifted from the black-haired girl’s purple handbag. It was a receipt for a week’s rent, to a Miss Marilyn Delorme, Apt. 211, Ridgeland Apartments, 118 Court Street.
He tucked it into his wallet and stood staring at the silent radio. “Steve, I think you got another job,” he said under his breath. “Something about this set-up smells.”
He slipped into a closetlike phone both in the corner of the room, dropped a nickel and dialed an allnight radio station. He had to dial four times before he got a clear line to the Owl Program announcer.
“How’s to play King Leopardi’s record of ‘Solitude’ again?” he asked him.
“Got a lot of requests piled up. Played it twice already. Who’s calling?”
“Steve Grayce, night man at the Carlton Hotel.”
“Oh, a sober guy on his job. For you, pal, anything.”
Steve went back to the davenport, snapped the radio on and lay down on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head.
Ten minutes later the high, piercingly sweet trumpet notes of King Leopardi came softly from the radio, muted almost to a whisper, and sustaining E above high C for an almost incredible period of time.
“Shucks,” Steve grumbled, when the record ended. “A guy that can play like that—maybe I was too tough with him.”
THREE
Court Street was old town, wop town, crook town, arty town. It lay across the top of Bunker Hill and you could find anything there from down-at-heels ex-Greenwich-villagers to crooks on the lam, from ladies of anybody’s evening to County Relief clients brawling with haggard landladies in grand old houses with scrolled porches, parquetry floors, and immense sweeping banisters of white oak, mahogany and Circassian walnut.
It had been a nice place once, had Bunker Hill, and from the days of its niceness there still remained the funny little funicular railway, called the Angel’s Flight, which crawled up and down a yellow clay bank from Hill Street. It was afternoon when Steve Grayce got off the car at the top, its only passenger. He walked along in the sun, a tall, wide-shouldered, rangylooking man in a well-cut blue suit.
He turned west at Court and began to read the numbers. The one he wanted was two from the corner, across the street from a red brick funeral parlor with a sign in gold over it: Paolo Perrugini Funeral Home. A swarthy iron-gray Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of the curtained door of the red brick building, smoking a cigar and waiting for somebody to die.
One-eighteen was a three-storied frame apartment house. It had a glass door, well masked by a dirty net curtain, a hall runner eighteen inches wide, dim doors with numbers painted on them with dim-paint, a staircase halfway back. Brass stair rods glittered in the dimness of the hallway.
Steve Grayce went up the stairs and prowled back to the front. Apartment 211, Miss Marilyn Delorme, was on the right, a front apartment. He tapped lightly on the wood, waited, tapped again. Nothing moved beyond the silent door, or in the hallway. Behind another door across the hall somebody coughed and kept on coughing.
Standing there in the half-light Steve Grayce wondered why he had come. Miss Delorme had carried a gun. Leopardi had received some kind of a threat letter and torn it up and thrown it away. Miss Delorme had checked out of the Carlton about an hour after Steve told her Leopardi was gone. Even at that—
He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked as if it would listen to reason. He tried a pick on it, snicked the bolt back and stepped softly into the room. He shut the door, but the pick wouldn’t lock it.
The room was dim with drawn shades across two front windows. The air smelled of face powder. There was light-painted furniture, a pull-down double bed which was pulled down but had been made up. There was a magazine on it, a glass tray full of cigarette butts, a pint bottle half full of whiskey, and a glass on a chair beside the bed. Two pillows had been used for a back rest and were still crushed in the middle.
On the dresser there was a composition toilet set, neither cheap nor expensive, a comb with black hair in it, a tray of manicuring stuff, plenty of spilled powder—in the bathroom, nothing. In a closet behind the bed a lot of clothes and two suitcases. The shoes were all one size.
Steve stood beside the bed and pinched his chin. “Blossom, the spitting blonde, doesn’t live here,” he said under his breath. “Just Marilyn the torn-pants brunette.”
He went back to the dresser and pulled drawers out. In the bottom drawer, under the piece of wall paper that lined it, he found a box of .25 copper-nickel automatic shells. He poked at the butts in the ash tray. All had lipstick on them. He pinched his chin again, then feathered the air with the palm of his hand, like an oarsman with a scull.
“Bunk,” he said softly. “Wasting your time, Stevie.”
He walked over to the door and reached for the knob, then turned back to the bed and lifted it by the footrail.
Miss MarIlyn Delorme was in.
She lay on her side on the floor under the bed, long legs scissored out as if in running. One mule was on, one off. Garters and skin showed at the tops of her stockings, and a blue rose on something pink. She wore a square-necked, shortsleeved dress that was not too clean. Her neck above the dress was blotched with purple bruises.
Her face was a dark plum color, her eyes had the faint stale glitter of death, and her mouth was open so far that it foreshortened her face. She was colder than ice, and still quite limp. She had been dead two or three hours at least, six hours at most.
The purple bag was beside her, gaping like her mouth. Steve didn’t touch any of the stuff that had been emptied out on the floor. There was no gun and there were no papers.
He let the bed down over her again, then made the rounds of the apartment, wiping everything he had touched and a lot of things he couldn’t remember whether he had touched or not.
He listened at the door and stepped out. The hall was still empty. The man behind the opposite door still coughed. Steve went down the stairs, looked at the mailboxes and went back along the lower hall to a door.
Behind this door a chair creaked monotonously. He knocked and a woman’s sharp voice called out. Steve opened the door with his handkerchief and stepped in.
In the middle of the room a woman rocked in an old Boston rocker, her body in the slack boneless attitude of exhaustion. She had a mud-colored face, stringy hair, gray cotton stockings—everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish.
“Are you the manager?”
The woman stopped rocking, screamed, “Hi, Jake! Company!” at the top of her voice, and started rocking again.
An icebox door thudded shut behind a partly open inner door and a very big man came into the room carrying a can of beer. He had a doughy mooncalf face, a tuft of fuzz on top of an otherwise bald head, a thick brutal neck and chin, and brown pig eyes about as expressionless as the woman’s. He needed a shave—had needed one the day before—and his collarless shirt gaped over a big hard hairy chest. He wore scarlet suspenders with large gilt buckles on them.
He held the can of beer out to the woman. She clawed it out of his hand and said bitterly: “I’m so tired I ain’t got no sense.”
The man said: “Yah. You ain’t done the halls so good at that.”
The woman snarled: “I done ‘em as good as I aim to.” She sucked the beer thirstily.
Steve looked at the man and said: “Manager?”
“Yah. ‘S me. Jake Stoyanoff. Two hun’erd eighty-six stripped, and still plenty tough.”
Steve said: “Who lives in Two-eleven?”
The big man leaned forward a little from the waist and snapped his suspenders. Nothing changed in his eyes. The skin along his big jaw may have tightened a little. “A dame,” he said.
“Alone?”