A Friendly Game of Murder (23 page)

Chapter 39

“Y
ou know who did this?” Doyle asked heatedly. “Show me the brute, and I’ll tear him limb from limb.”

Dorothy wondered,
Now where did I see him last?
She couldn’t be sure. Finally she said, “I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to organize a manhunt.”

“Gladly!” Doyle said. Even Fairbanks seemed thrilled at hunting down the murderer. Again she wondered what it would be like to be one of these virile men. What hot-blooded, callous thoughts rushed through their single-minded brains? She felt a mix of envy and repulsion.

But Benchley didn’t seem quite so full of bloodlust. Actually, he seemed rather deep in thought. “What if,” he said slowly, “instead of a manhunt, we first try a dog hunt?”

“Benchley’s right!” Fairbanks said. “We’ll hunt this murderer down like a dog.”

“No, no,” Benchley said, amused. “That’s not what I meant. I mean we use the dog to do the hunting.” And he gazed down at the furry little figure of Woody, who had again hopped into the large, empty seafood carton and was busy sniffing about.

“That’s it!” Dorothy cried. “Come with me.”

She snatched up the dog and then grabbed the carton. She led the group out of the pantry and into the corridor. Then, to their surprise, she put the dog down again and shoved the carton to his nose. “Here, Woody, here.” Then she tossed the carton back into the pantry and shut the door. “Now, go! Find!”

But the dog just stood there, looking up at her expectantly with his big, wet eyes.

“Go, Woody. Find the smell!” she urged.

The dog put his nose to the concrete floor and sniffed.

“Good boy. That’s it!”

He sniffed his way back to the pantry door, then looked up at her and barked.

The men groaned.

“No, my little man. Find where it came from!” she said desperately to the dog. Then she turned to Doyle. “I thought Kingsley said this would work.”

Doyle shrugged his shoulders.

When she looked back down again, the dog had trotted away. He was now sniffing along the corridor and moving away from the kitchen.

“Good boy!” she cheered.

“Follow that dog!” Benchley said. And they did.

Woody scampered toward the street entrance of the service corridor. But before he reached the heavy door to the street (which was now locked and barred), he made a quick right turn toward the door to the lobby. He was moving faster now. But then he had to stop at the leather-clad swinging door and wait to be let through.

Dorothy pushed open the door. Woody hurried into the lobby. They found themselves between the telephone operator’s office on the left and the front desk on their right. The lobby was deserted, but they could hear Woollcott’s nasal voice and the murmur of the crowd in the dining room at the upper end of the lobby.

The dog zipped forward, then darted to the right toward the front foyer. He was momentarily out of sight, and they heard him give a quick bark. Then they heard a grunt, a thump and a plaintive yelp. Woody came sliding toward them across the tile floor, as though he had been given a hard kick.

Dorothy was the first to round the corner and see the tall man at the front entrance. He wore a waiter’s clothes. He faced away from her and was shoving furiously and ineffectually at the locked doors. His clawlike hands ripped at the paper quarantine notice. He seemed to Dorothy to be both dangerously enraged and yet wretchedly pitiable.

Then he saw her out of the corner of his eye and turned his desperate gaze at her.

“You,” he sneered at her. “You and your pampered, precious friends—!”

Benchley, Doyle and Fairbanks were behind her now.

“You don’t even know me,” she said. “But I know you.”

She stared into his bright eyes and studied his thin face, his high cheekbones and his narrow, pointed nose.

“He’s not a waiter,” Benchley said. “He doesn’t even work here.”

“Why, that’s the ice deliveryman!” Fairbanks said, perplexed. “The one who spilled that tub of ice at my party!”

“Oh, but he’s much more than that. Aren’t you?” she said to the man. “In fact, you’re Bibi’s brother.”

Her statement took the men momentarily by surprise—it was just enough of a moment for the man to make his move. He lunged forward and grabbed Woody by the scruff of the neck. Fairbanks, a natural athlete, rushed forward to tackle him. But the tall man flung the poor dog toward Fairbanks’ midsection.

Fairbanks deftly caught the dog as though catching a football and tucked Woody tightly into the crook of his arm—but doing so slowed him down. At the same instant, Dorothy instinctively reached forward to grab the dog. She suddenly found herself entangled with Fairbanks, which prevented him from chasing after the man.

Moving quickly, the man dodged around them and was now running full tilt toward the dining room.

“After the blackguard!” Doyle yelled, leading the chase. Although he was a big and virile man for his age, he was no match for the younger man’s speed.

The man reached the threshold to the dining room, shoved his way into the crowd and quickly disappeared from their sight.

Fairbanks handed Woody over to Dorothy, then he sprinted forward and quickly caught up to Doyle. But the two of them stopped at the edge of the crowd and stood on tiptoes to see over everyone’s heads to determine where the man went.

Fairbanks jumped straight up to get a better look. “I see him! He’s almost halfway to Woollcott already. Come on!”

Fairbanks slipped into the crowd as though parting a curtain, and Doyle followed. But, like a curtain, the opening closed quickly. And Dorothy and Benchley found themselves against a seemingly impenetrable wall of people.

“We’ll never get through this mob in time,” Benchley said.

“We don’t have to,” Dorothy said. “We can go around.”

She turned and hurried back through the lobby. Benchley followed. They rounded the front desk and pushed through the leather-clad door to the service corridor. They hurried past the pantry and back into the kitchen.

“I thought I told you not to bring that dog—!” the chef wailed.

She ignored him as they rushed through the busy kitchen.

They burst into the dining room and nearly bumped into Woollcott. He was facing the crowd and holding the upturned top hat over his head. He was in the middle of making some kind of announcement.

“And I have here the most valuable postage stamp in all the world—the invert tête-bêche, the ‘Bearded Lady’—in this very hat!” he said in his most theatrical voice.

Dorothy tugged at his tuxedo. She hissed at him, “Never mind that game. It’s too late. We’ve already found the killer.”

Woollcott turned to her with incomprehension inscribed on his face. “You . . .
what
? But our plan—”

All of a sudden a tall figure leaped from the crowd toward Woollcott. Dorothy automatically clutched Woody closer to her and backed away, bumping against Benchley.

But the attacker wasn’t the tall man in the waiter’s outfit as she might have guessed. It was Jordan.

“Give it to me!” he yelled at Woollcott, and grasped for the top hat. But Woollcott’s chubby arms clamped the hat to his belly as tightly as a vise.

Then, to Dorothy’s surprise, the tall man in the waiter’s uniform did jump into their midst. He shoved Woollcott and Jordan out of his way and raced toward the kitchen. Woollcott and Jordan fell down in a heap at Dorothy’s feet. But before the man could get entirely past her and through the doors, Woody lunged forward and snapped. The man yowled in pain but didn’t slow down. He shouldered his way through the swinging doors and into the kitchen.

Jordan was now on his feet, with the top hat in his hands and a victorious smile on his thin lips. He pushed through the crowd to get away. Woollcott lay on his back on the floor, twisting like a tortoise unable to get to its feet.

As soon as Jordan was safely out of their reach, he turned back around. He held aloft the hat, which was now crumpled into a tight ball in his hand. “Ha, I have it! Finally I have it back!”

But from behind Jordan, the taller of the two nuns appeared. “What do you have, mister?”

Jordan was slightly taken aback but not enough to quell his feeling of victory. “The tête-bêche! The ‘Bearded Lady’! I have it!”

The taller nun, now joined by the other nun, said, “You sure about that? ’Cause then what do we have here?” and held up the silver locket.

Jordan’s look of triumph disappeared. He reached for the locket to snatch it away, but the nun was too quick for him and pulled it out of his reach.

“Uh-uh,” the second nun chided. “You can look, but you better not touch!”

Then, with a taunting look, the first nun popped the locket open for Jordan to see.

“But it’s empty,” Jordan said, and the victorious smile returned to his face. “Didn’t you dimwits even look inside it first?”

The second nun grabbed the locket out of the other one’s hands and looked inside. “Damn it! He’s right. It’s been empty all this time! Where the hell is that stamp?”

Jordan held up the balled top hat. “Right in here, sisters.” Then he hobbled away through the crowd toward the lobby. “
Pax vobiscum
, suckers!”

The nuns followed him.

By this time Doyle and Fairbanks had joined Dorothy and Benchley. Woollcott had finally risen to his feet. “What’s going on?” he yelled.

“Where’s that damned deliveryman?” Fairbanks asked.

“He just went into the kitchen,” Dorothy said.

“Dr. Hurst needs that stamp back,” Doyle said. “We must split up—to divide and conquer.”

“I’m going after that bastard who murdered Bibi,” she said. “Who’s with me?”

Both Benchley and Fairbanks stepped forward.

“No, Fred,” she said to Benchley. “You go after Jordan. You never liked him anyway.” She moved close and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Take care of yourself.”

To her surprise, Benchley blushed. He turned quickly, grabbed Woollcott by the sleeve and moved through the crowd after Jordan and the nuns.

She looked to Doyle and Fairbanks and gave Woody an affectionate squeeze. “Let’s get him, boys!”

They once again entered the kitchen, and she braced herself for another of the chef’s tirades. But although the room was crowded with waiters and kitchen staff, all was silent and still.

Jacques stood frozen at his preparation table. His head was bare, and his face was as white as his smock. On the cutting board in front of him, his tall white chef’s hat was skewered through the middle with his long carving knife.

When he saw Dorothy, Jacques pointed at the opening to the basement stairs. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “That man, he went down there.”

With Doyle and Fairbanks right behind her, she hurried toward the stairwell.

“Mrs. Parker,” the chef said. “I would not go down there if I were you.”

She gathered her courage, held Woody tightly and descended the darkened stairs. Fairbanks and Doyle followed.

Chapter 40

B
enchley and Woollcott threaded through the dining room’s buzzing crowd and emerged into the quiet and nearly deserted lobby.

They arrived just in time to see Jordan, running full speed, suddenly stumble and fall hard to the floor.

Harpo Marx lay half-awake on a couch and with one leg extended out.

“Have a nice trip?” he asked Jordan. “See you next fall!”

In a moment the two nuns were almost on top of Jordan and ready to rip him to shreds.

But then Jordan did something unexpected—he slammed the heel of his big black orthopedic shoe against the floor. The heel and sole popped off, and a small snub-nosed pistol sprung up into the air. Jordan caught it with a practiced hand and quickly pointed the gun at the nuns. They couldn’t stop in time. They skidded across the smooth hardwood floor and looked as though they would collide with him.

But in a flash Jordan was on his feet. He reached out and grabbed the shorter nun around the waist. He held the pistol to the nun’s head.

“Stop right where you are!” Jordan commanded.

The other nun froze, hands in the air. Benchley, Woollcott and Harpo halted in their tracks as well.

“Jordan, what do you think you’re doing?” Benchley asked. “You really don’t have a clubfoot after all?”

Jordan still held the crushed top hat in the hand that encircled the nun’s waist. “I’m returning the stamp to the rightful owner—the London Museum. I was assigned to do it, and I always finish the job.”

“Assigned?” Benchley said. “By Dr. Hurst?”

Jordan snickered. “That crazy old fool? Hell no. I’m a Pink agent working undercover. I was hired by Lloyd’s of London to bring the Bearded Lady safely back to England. It’s insured for millions, and they don’t want to pay up if they can avoid it.”

“A Pink agent?” Benchley asked. Then he remembered Dr. Hurst’s telegram.
LLOYDS HIRED PINKS
. . . .

“What the devil is a Pink agent?” Woollcott sneered.

“A Pinkerton!” Jordan said indignantly. “A detective. A private investigator. You know, ‘The Eye That Never Sleeps’?”

“Well, what do you know, Aleck?” Benchley muttered. “We had a detective right here all this time. You didn’t need to pretend to be one after all.”

“Pretend!” Woollcott roared. “Who said anything about pretending?”

“The eye that never sleeps, huh?” said the tall nun, who had produced a large pistol and now aimed it directly at Jordan. “You certainly slept when we knocked you on the head and took the locket from your shoe. You slept like a baby. And now I’m going to put you to sleep for good.”

* * *

“It’s Bibi’s brother?” Doyle asked Dorothy as they moved cautiously and quietly along yet another twisty, darkened subbasement corridor. “How did you know?”

“Yes, how did you know that?” Fairbanks asked.

“I should have known it sooner,” she said. “They have exactly the same pixie nose.”

“No one else recognized the similarity,” Doyle said. “A beautiful Broadway starlet and a lowly ice deliveryman—who would guess they are siblings?”

“Well, I didn’t,” she said. “Not at first. Not until I saw that invoice with the name ‘B. Bibelot’ on the bottom. But the initial
B
is not for Bibi. It’s for—I don’t know—Bill or Bob or Barry. . . .”

“How did you even know Bibi had a brother?” Doyle asked.

“Jane Grant mentioned it in passing last night. She wrote a puff piece on Bibi a few months ago.”

“Can you be sure that he was the one who murdered her—his very own sister?” Doyle asked with distaste.

“Once it was apparent that Bibi was killed by dry ice, then it just became a question of who had access to a bucketful of it. Frank Case told me they usually just throw it out into the alley to dispose of it. But because the whole hotel was locked up last night, it seemed likely that the dry ice was still somewhere inside. And the person who had access to it was the one who brought it to the hotel in the first place—”

She stopped. Up ahead in the darkness there was a sudden wail. Woody trembled in her arms.

Doyle cocked his head to hear. “That’s someone in pain. Quick, we must go!”

“Hold on,” she said. “That wasn’t someone. That was some
thing
.”

“What are you talking about?” Fairbanks asked. “That was an inhuman scream.”

“It was inhuman, all right,” she said. “That was the sound of the freezer door.”

Very slowly and reluctantly, she continued forward. Doyle and Fairbanks followed right behind her.

“Let’s be very cautious, my friends,” Doyle said—quite unnecessarily, Dorothy thought.

They reached a corner, and she took a cautious peek around the bend. The tunnel was empty. She saw only the closed door of the walk-in freezer. Just the sight of it gave her chills.

“He must be inside,” she whispered.

“I say we leave him in there, then,” Fairbanks suggested. “Let him freeze to death for what he did.”

“Certainly not,” Doyle said in a low voice. “Freezing’s too good for him. He should be brought to justice and his crimes paraded in the light of day. Dorothy, what do you think?”

She looked back and forth between their stern faces. She decided she wasn’t too thrilled about either option.

“How about we split the difference?” she said after a moment’s thought. “We’ll let him cool his heels in there awhile, and when he’s had enough—when he’s nearly frozen stiff and harmless—then we’ll drag him out. That’s a kinder gesture than he gave to me and Mr. Benchley when he locked us in there.”

Suddenly the door swung open with that deafening, rusty wail. Woody leaped out of Dorothy’s arms and sped away around the corner, back from where they had come. Bibi’s brother stepped halfway out of the freezer. Something glinted in his raised hand. He flung it hard at them.

Dorothy—already half-turned away to see where Woody had gone—managed to step aside. The object whirred past her head. It hit Fairbanks right between the eyes with a sickening thump and knocked him backward. His head smacked against the stone wall, and his body, limp as a rag doll, slid to the floor. Across the ground skittered the shattered chunks of the thrown object—a thick icicle.

The man disappeared back into the freezer but left the door wide open.

“Stay away!” His voice echoed from inside. “Just leave me alone!”

“You detestable coward,” Doyle thundered, his big hands balled into fists. “Come out of there or—”

She put a hand on Doyle’s arm to quiet him. Then she called out, “Tell us, what’s your name? Is it Bill? Bob?”

“Blake.”

“Blake”? Jeez, one kid named Bibi and the other one named Blake? What kind of oddball parents did these two have? No wonder both children turned out so wrong
.

She spoke as patiently as she could. “Listen, Blake, you didn’t mean to kill your sister, did you?”

“Yes. Yes, I
did
mean to do it.” His quavering voice echoed. “But . . . I-I didn’t want to. I
had
to. I couldn’t take any more!”

* * *

The taller nun still had the big gun pointed at Jordan. “Now give me the stamp and let my partner go. Or else.” Then the nun pulled off her—or rather
his
—veil, revealing a square, closely shaved head.

“Look!” sputtered Woollcott to Benchley. “That nun is a man. A man!”

“Why, certainly,” said Benchley with a bored yawn. “Both nuns are men. Didn’t you know? I’ve known that for ages.”

“You have?” Woollcott asked. “What other secrets are you keeping from me?”

“Well, both nuns are gangsters, of course,” Benchley said matter-of-factly. “Anyone around here who knows anything knows that. They’re here to steal the stamp from Dr. Hurst. Then they’re supposed to take it to their boss in Brooklyn, who’s going to sell it to an even worse gangster in Chicago. . . . Aleck, why are you looking at me with such a surprised expression? You mean to tell me you don’t know
any
of this? And you call yourself a detective? Tsk-tsk.”

Benchley was rather enjoying himself by teasing Woollcott this way. Then he noticed that the gangsters were staring at him, too. But unlike Woollcott’s surprised expression, theirs were extremely angry.

“You!” said the tall one to Benchley. “You’re the telephone operator! We been looking for you for hours. Don’t go nowhere, mister. Soon as we take care of this little cream puff”—he waved his gun at Jordan—“then we’re going to take care of you, and how.”

But while the tall one was talking to Benchley, Jordan swung his snub-nosed pistol, aimed and fired. The bullet caught the tall gangster in the upper arm.

“Ow! That hurt,” the gangster yelled, and clapped his hand to his injured arm. Then he reached out to take Jordan’s pistol. “What is that, a .22? Give me that little peashooter before—”

Jordan fired again. But as he did so, the smaller gangster wriggled free from his grasp and knocked away his gun hand. The shot went into the grandfather clock with a metallic clang.

The smaller gangster swung his fist into Jordan’s face. Jordan came back with a hard left hook—but this fist held the crumpled top hat. The taller one stepped in and stopped the punch with both hands. Then he grabbed the top hat.

“I guess that hat’s ruined,” Woollcott muttered sourly. “Well, it was last year’s style anyhow.”

Benchley whispered, “What about the stamp?”

Woollcott chuckled to him, “There’s no stamp in there. Heaven knows where that damned stamp is!”

The shorter gangster socked Jordan in the jaw and snatched away his little pistol. Then he punched Jordan again, just for good measure. Jordan fell down in a heap.

The taller gangster unfurled the crumpled hat and reached inside.

“Perhaps,” Benchley whispered, “now would be the time to make a hasty retreat. . . .”

The gangster pulled a small slip of white paper out of the hat. “This ain’t no stamp!” He held it out at arm’s length to read it. His voice thundered. “
Detective—Woollcott!
Who the hell is Detective Woollcott?”

“Yes,” Woollcott whispered to Benchley, “that
is
a swell idea.” He took a small step backward.

“The fat one! He’s trying to get away,” the taller gangster yelled. “
He’s
got the stamp! Get him!”