Reno Rendezvous, page 15
Colonel Primrose had followed me out. He took hold of my arm.
“Come and sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you—seriously.”
He nodded toward the leather upholstered nook in the far corner. I took a step, and tripped on something. He steadied me till I got my balance. We both looked down.
Stretching taut across the floor, wound a couple of times around the heavy chromium pedestal of one of the cocktail tables, was a rope. I looked down at it, in the half-dark of the room, not understanding, bewildered, and with some kind of a vague, reasonless chill suddenly on my heart. Then my heart gave a quick plunge as Colonel Primrose’s hand tightened abruptly on my elbow, and he caught his breath sharply.
“Stay here . . .” he said. He pushed me back a little with one hand, and took a step toward the end of the room, where that taut rope led. And I followed him, and looked around his shoulder when he stopped suddenly. It was very dark at that end of the room, by the River, but by the bright lights along the bridge and the white, pink and blue glow of the Riverside Hotel sign, I could make out a mass of black lace, huddled limp and dreadfully motionless against the yellow leather of the curving seat . . . and on the seat too, just visible under the edge of the table there, and held down at a horrible angle by a turn of the rope around that second pedestal, a white throat . . . around it, biting into the swollen flesh, the noose, taut and strangling.
For an incredible instant that seemed eternity we both stared down in horror. Then I heard my voice in an agonized and terrified cry: “Oh, God, it’s Kaye Gorman!”
Colonel Primrose moved sharply forward, bent down, pulled desperately at that rope around the white throat.
“Get Buck!” he barked at me.
I couldn’t have moved . . . but I didn’t have to. Sergeant Buck was already coming through the swinging doors. The thought flashed through my mind, ludicrous even in that moment, that he’d seen his Colonel follow me into the deserted and semi-dark room.
He came across from the door in three strides, pushed me roughly aside, ripped a knife out of his cowboy belt, slashed through the rope by the white throat, loosened the noose. He lifted the limp black lace form round the table.
As the girl’s body slumped down against the yellow leather again—almost, I thought dreadfully, like a living figure—her head rolled back against the seat.
I heard Colonel Primrose’s sharp exclamation. And I stood there, staring past him, shaking violently, unable to say a word, or to think. It wasn’t Kaye Gorman. I was looking down on the blue-black hair and pitiful, once lovely face of Vicki Ray.
20
I have the vaguest, sickest memory of the rest of that night—of the people who came pouring in through the swinging doors when they heard that cry of mine . . . and chief among them Kaye Gorman herself, in the black lace dress that had made me make that mistake.
She stared at me, her baby face white as death, as if in some way she already saw the incredible significance that this scene was to have before we were through.
“I . . . I thought it was you,” I managed to say.
She shook her head—unnecessarily.
“They just haven’t got around to me yet,” she said. She was trying to be indifferent and cynical, but her face was dreadfully white and her hands shook as she lighted a cigarette.
Colonel Primrose’s face was very grim. “All of you go back in there, and stay,” he said curtly. He looked around. “Buck!”
There was a commotion outside, and Sergeant Buck came violently through the swinging doors. He had two men with him, each by the nape of the neck, like some monstrous Puss-in-Boots moving its kittens.
“Tryin’ to sneak out through the kitchen, sir,” he said composedly, out of the corner of his mouth.
I stared at them. One was my friend Whitey, the other Vicki Ray’s landlord, Mr. Tucker. Both were shaking and terrified.
“I never done it!” Whitey screamed. “I swear to Jesus I never! I ain’t seen her all night! I swear I ain’t!”
“Get them out in the other room,” Colonel Primrose said. “I am a special investigator—I’m in charge here till the police come. Get somebody at each door, Sergeant. See that nobody leaves and get the name of each person.—You can stay here.”
He was looking—rather oddly—at Mr. Tucker when he said that. Mr. Tucker’s face was ashy-gray around his yellowish mustaches.
The lounge emptied until only Colonel Primrose and I and Mr. Tucker were left. Then I noticed Clem Bonner, behind me by the windows overlooking the Truckee. He was standing as if he had taken root there, the ash hanging intact almost the length of his cigarette.
“What’s on your mind, Bonner?” Colonel Primrose said abruptly.
Clem turned slowly, the ash splattering on the gold carpet. “Nothing,” he said. He turned again and stood, staring out of the windows into the garish white-and-pink-and-blue night.
I moved over by him as Bill Hogan arrived . . . fear creeping about in my heart like a tiny yellow lizard in an empty cabin in the desert. The coroner was with him. They stood looking down at Vicki for an instant, raised her head, let it fall back, touched her hand.
“She hasn’t been dead half an hour,” Colonel Primrose said. He looked around. “There must be some other way out of here.”
Hogan went to the swinging doors. In a moment Sergeant Buck appeared with one of the waiters, a Swiss named Ferdinand.
“Yes, sir. There’s a door there, goes to the kitchen, and that door goes to the powder room.”
He pointed to a panel in the wall to the left, and to another across the room behind a tub of palms.
“So anyone could go from this lounge directly to the bar and dining room, or indirectly through the kitchen, or through the powder room?”
“Yes, sir. Or they could go out through the service entrance in the alley.”
Mr. Tucker’s hands shook violently.
“What are you doing here, Tucker?” Hogan asked.
“Somebody called up one of the ladies at my house . . . I came to see if I could find her . . .”
I don’t know why I felt no twinge of sympathy for Mr. Tucker. His face was ashy-white as he babbled away incoherently, and he was certainly more abject than many of the things I find myself instinctively rising to defend. I suppose it was because there was something furtive about him.
“Vicki lived at your place, didn’t she?”
Mr. Tucker nodded wretchedly.
Colonel Primrose turned to Buck. “Where was he?”
“In that passage out there, sir. He and this Whitey were fightin’ to get ahead of each other at the alley door. I was lookin’ after the other bird is how I happened to catch him.”
“Take him off to the station,” Hogan said curtly. Mr. Tucker’s voice rose to a scream as a detective led him away through the panel to the right: “But I wasn’t ever out of the passage!”
I watched Colonel Primrose looking down at the soft folds of black chantilly lace trailing over the yellow leather seat to the floor. “Find out whose rope that is,” I heard Bill Hogan say.
“That’s Ben Tavish’s—a lot of them were doing tricks with it before the orchestra came in.”
Hogan turned to another of his men. “Find out who were doing tricks with it. See how many cowpokes—professionals and gentlemen—were in there. It isn’t everybody can throw a rope.”
“The rope wasn’t thrown,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “Not over the back of this booth. She was sitting here facing the river. You’ll probably find she’d had a good deal to drink. Somebody came in with the rope . . .”
He stopped abruptly, staring down at the dead girl, and shrugged. I saw Clem Bonner, still by the windows at the end of the room, move slightly.
“A terrible chance to take . . . but this is a killer who’s willing to take terrible chances.”
He looked out through the open doors at the bar, where the little group from the Washoe were gathered trying to keep Whitey quiet. I looked for Judy. She and Polly Wagner and a couple of men dressed in Western clothes were sitting at a table in the dining room. It flashed into my mind that I was very glad I’d burned that unfinished letter. Whatever connection there might be between Judy and Dex Cromwell, there could be none apparent—with that letter burned—between her and the dead girl.
“We’ll have a look,” Hogan said grimly. He took his atomizer out of its black wooden box, sprayed the glass table top with a gray-green powder, and whistled. The side on which Vicki Ray had sat was covered with prints of many hands. The side near the doors was wiped clean.
“The rope was slipped over her head, jerked tight, looped around the pedestal,” Colonel Primrose said. “Her head was drawn down on the seat. She was absolutely helpless. She hadn’t a chance in the world, even if she’d been sober. The murderer then coolly anchored the rope end to the table over there on his way out. It wouldn’t have taken a minute. In fact it was all over—practically—in thirty seconds. Any noise would be drowned by all that clatter outside. The killer then simply went back—through the passage to the alley and through the front door again, or through the kitchen, or through the powder room.”
Hogan shook his head. “The powder room’s out. A man wouldn’t risk getting caught in there.”
“No risk for a woman, Hogan.”
Hogan’s bright blue eyes sharpened. He nodded.
“You’ve got to consider all the possibilities. That’s where you start—finding out who saw who, coming or going through any of these entrances.”
He turned to me. “You were sitting facing this room, Mrs. Latham. Did you see anyone come in here, or come out?”
I saw Clem Bonner move again. I knew instantly, of course, what was in his mind . . . and also that there was nothing for it.
“My niece came in here during dinner, and stayed a few minutes,” I said. “She certainly didn’t have a rope with her. And I doubt if she could tie a knot to save her life.”
Hogan grunted. “Didn’t need to. Anybody could jerk a noose and loop a rope around a pedestal. Get her in.”
He nodded to one of his men. I didn’t dare look at Clem.
Judy came swiftly through the doors, her face pale, her eyes steady and unflinching.
“Nobody was in here when I was,” she said. “Except that a man—I thought one of the waiters—looked in through some kind of a hole in that wall.”
She pointed to the panel opening into the passage to the kitchen and alley.
“You know who it was?”
“I’m not sure. I think it was the man Sergeant Buck brought back. Not Whitey—the other one.”
“Vicki wasn’t here?”
“No. I was only here a couple of minutes. I went out through the powder room there. Nobody was there but Mrs. de Courcey. I didn’t see Vicki at all, not after she came in with you, Colonel Primrose.”
Colonel Primrose nodded. “You can go, Mrs. Bonner. Ask Mrs. de Courcey to come in, Buck.—Wait a minute.”
He turned to me. “Who is that girl with Judy?”
“That’s Polly Wagner,” I said.
He nodded to Buck, and in a minute Polly Wagner came in . . . Polly with her charming simple sanity, and the sort of incandescent glow of hope behind her clear eyes that still almost redeems Reno in spite of everything . . . the gambling, and the dope, and the general vulgarity.
“Yes, I saw Judy come out here,” she said. “But she wasn’t here long. She just came out because she couldn’t sit there another minute and have somebody looking like a hungry brook trout across the room, never taking his eyes off her.”
She gave Clem a quick amused glance.
“I mean, she couldn’t possibly, because—odd as it may seem—she’s really perfectly mad about him.”
I thought her disarming smile softened even the monolithic visage of Sergeant Buck.
“But that’s not what you’re interested in, is it. I know she was just here a minute or so. And I wasn’t even paying the least attention to anybody else. The man I was talking to has fifteen thousand sheep up on the range, and we were talking about them, and he’s down here to get a doctor to take up with him tomorrow because his Basque herder’s got a sick wife.—The only odd thing I noticed was that Vicki—I don’t know her as well as people who live in town do—seemed sort of excited . . . like people do when they’re . . . oh, taking a ski jump and aren’t sure whether they’re going to land or break their necks.”
Colonel Primrose nodded, looking rather curiously at her. “I . . . thought so too,” he said. “All right, Mrs. Wagner.” He nodded to Buck.
Mary de Courcey had on a black chiffon dress and a tight fitting black crownless turban over her flaming red hair, and—a little to my surprise—she was dreadfully upset.
“Oh, that poor girl!” she whispered. “It’s horrible!”
She kept her eyes away from the table. I was surprised still more to see that they were suddenly filled with tears.
“Mrs. Bonner says she saw you in the powder room, Mary,” Colonel Primrose said quietly.
“Yes, of course. Why shouldn’t she?”
Mrs. de Courcey wiped her eyes and resumed her crisp and masterful manner.
“She came out here, out of this room. We talked a minute—I don’t remember what about—and she went on through the powder room. Vicki came in while I was still there. I was repairing a shoulder-strap, if it interests you. She helped me, and I went back to the bar.”
“Leaving Vicki there?”
“Yes. She’d flopped down in a chair and lighted a cigarette. She’d been in to see me late this afternoon, she had a rambling story about people perjuring themselves, or something—I didn’t make head or tail of it. She wanted to know what happened to them, and all that.”
I looked at her, remembering her voice coming out of the room as I stood in the hall watching Judy go down to the elevator: “That’s nothing but blackmail!” As I turned away my eyes caught Colonel Primrose’s. He was looking at me intently.
He turned back at once to Mrs. de Courcey. Her blue eyes were fastened, for the first time, on the lace folds of Vicki’s dress.
“John!” she said abruptly. “This doesn’t make sense! No one would want to hurt that girl. Whatever they say about her—and it’s plenty, and it’s all true—she was one of the most amusing, and generous, and kindhearted people I’ve ever met in all my life. She really was! Believe me, I can’t think anybody would want to . . . to kill her.”
She twisted her hands together, agitated and distressed and I thought really hurt.
“I don’t suppose it makes the least sense, and I’m certainly the last person in the world—”
She stopped abruptly.
“What is it, Mary?”
An odd look came into Mrs. de Courcey’s handsome face.
“You know I’m not likely to start pretending I’m psychic at my age, John,” she said slowly, her manner quite different from any I’d noticed in her. “But when I was out at the bar, and Mrs. Latham here screamed ‘It’s Kaye Gorman!’ . . . I . . . I just knew it was right—that Kaye Gorman was dead. I knew it—even though I could see her in the mirror. It was like Dracula, John, only just the opposite—you know the man couldn’t see Dracula in the mirror, and a mirror was just where I was seeing her, but I knew that even if I could see her in the mirror I couldn’t ever see her in the flesh again!”
Bill Hogan looked oddly at Colonel Primrose. “That’s screwy, ma’am,” he said.
“Exactly!” Mrs. de Courcey cried. “It’s completely screwy! But there it is! I suppose all it means is that I wasn’t at all surprised to hear something appalling had happened to Mrs. Gorman—as if I’d been expecting it. And yet it hadn’t! And I think the reason Mrs. Gorman looked so frightened was that she was thinking exactly the same thing!”
Hogan scowled. I sympathized with him, entirely.
A light flickered in Colonel Primrose’s eyes. I took it he’d made some sense out of it.
“They were both wearing black lace dresses,” he said.
Hogan looked at him. “One of you boys get Mrs. Gorman in here,” he said curtly.
Mary de Courcey followed the man out.
“If somebody had to be dead every time some woman started screaming her head off,” Sergeant Buck said harshly, out of one corner of his granite jaw, “the town would look like a slaughterhouse.”
He gave me a fishy glance. “No offense meant, ma’am.”
“None taken, Sergeant,” I said, sweetly. I resisted a strong temptation to add, “You big tomato!” in the language of my younger son. Reno was really the perfect spot for most of his speech.
A sudden confused babble rose from the bar as Kaye Gorman came through the doors.
“Mrs. Gorman,” Colonel Primrose said, “—we’re trying to find out who was in the powder room this evening. Did you see anyone in there, coming or going?”
As she lifted those baby-blue eyes to him I had the sudden thought that I personally would never believe a word she said.
“I was in there once, Colonel. I was washing my hands in the little back room. I heard somebody come in, but there was nobody there when I came out.”
“When did you see Vicki last? Do you remember?”
“No, I don’t. You know the way she went in and out. I don’t think I saw her after the orchestra came in. She took that rope from somebody and said ‘You’d better let me check that, cowboy.’ Somebody at the bar said ‘You don’t need rope to throw ’em, Vicki.’ I don’t know who it was. I guess it sounded funny, because we all laughed fit to kill.”
She turned away, her lips quivering suddenly. “The poor kid, it’s a damn shame! But I guess it shows she didn’t kill Dex.”
She looked at me.
Colonel Primrose, whose eyes had been fixed absently on the black lace folds of her dinner dress and her silver kid sandals, looked at her, and at me.
