Death Under the Moonflower, page 4
“Fred!” she called. “Are you in there? Answer me.”
A key turned in the lock, the door was opened a few inches and Fred said hoarsely: “For God’s sake, get in here and shut up!”
Mallory slipped inside and watched him lock and bolt the door, cross the room and sink into a chair. He was shaking and his eyes looked large and glassy as he stared at one of the empty milk bottles which stood on the table. The fingers of his right hand were tight about the handle of a fruit knife.
The sight of his panic steadied Mallory. “I saw you run up the stairs,” she said. “I don’t blame you for being scared, but you might have waited a moment on me. Bert Larrick took time to put me in an elevator.”
“He wouldn’t have if he’d been in my shoes. Somebody was after Hieronymus. He’ll be after me now—if he finds out I’m here. What happened downstairs? Did you see?”
“Hieronymus simply crumpled up. When I left they were getting ready to carry him into the manager’s office, I think. It’s a madhouse down there.” Mallory took a cigarette from a package on the table and lighted it. “Fred, you and I are going to stay in this room until Bert Larrick comes. He said he would as soon as he could. You’re going to tell him everything you know about what’s been happening. You’ve been up to something crooked but you’re going to tell him that too.”
“No, I’m not. Not yet anyway. He talks too much and I’m afraid he’d crumb the deal sure enough. But if I can get a gun from him—” Fred started to his feet. “What’s that smell in this room? Is that poison gas?”
“It’s only a flower, Fred.”
Hard knuckles thumped on the door. Mallory looked in that direction and up at the closed transom, then at Fred, whose breathing was a succession of little snuffs in the stillness. He shook his head.
She waited, thinking that if this were Bert Larrick who had followed her up so quickly he would knock again and call when he got no response. So thick was the carpet in the hall that she couldn’t decide whether their visitor had walked away or was still standing there.
5
For all his forty-odd years of knocking about the Mexican border, Peter Bounty felt weak in the knees as he stood at the foot of a black leather and chromium davenport in the private office of Paul Palladay, manager of the Sutherland Hotel. It was all very well, he had seen, for Sutherland guests to be given the illusion that they were living like Spanish grandees, but for himself Mr. Palladay, now cooling his heels in his own anteroom, preferred modernity.
Hazel dominated blue in Bounty’s eyes as he watched his deputy straighten and stand with his hands on his hips, frowning down at Hieronymus.
“I can’t tell what’s the matter with you.” Larrick spoke crossly. “Why in the dickens don’t you want us to call the hospital for an ambulance?”
“I’m not going to any hospital here,” reiterated the man on the davenport, turning on Bounty the blank panes of his spectacles and that carved smile which, if he were the shifty rogue that the sheriff thought, stood him in such good stead as a mask. “I’m afraid to.”
Larrick glanced quickly at Bounty then demanded of Hieronymus: “What’re you afraid of?”
“Get me a doctor. I’ve been poisoned.”
“Well, darn it!” Larrick’s self-confident front was crumbling. He looked at Bounty again. “There’s a roomful of doctors upstairs. Lack, Angelo, Ainsworth and Cotillion are having dinner in Roger Norcott’s suite. Doctor Cotillion is that Chicago specialist. I suppose we couldn’t very well ask him. But maybe Doctor Lack would come.”
“Lack?” Hieronymus repeated, twisting a little. “I’m afraid of him. Get Doctor Cotillion. He’s from out of town. He’s safe. And he took a transfusion from me once. I’ll trust him.”
Bounty took a hand. “What about Doctor Angelo?” he asked quietly. “The county physician.”
“No, I’m afraid of him too.” One might as well have searched for expression on Hieronymus’ bald egglike head as on his glabrous face.
“And Doctor Ainsworth?”
“I tell you, I won’t have any of those doctors.”
“What makes you afraid of our town doctors?”
“Doctors can furnish poison. And somebody’s been at it for days, poisoning me slowly. That’s why I went to Brownsville, to get an out-of-town doctor to look at me.”
“Did you consult one there?”
“It was Saturday. And I saw in the paper Doctor Cotillion was here. I came back to see him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this at once?”
“If I can’t trust the doctors I can’t trust you. I told you to turn me loose and let me attend to my own affairs.”
Bounty ruminated on the end of a match and decided that the cylindrical upright chocolate bar in the corner between the head of the davenport and the south window was a water cooler. “Call and see if you can get Doctor Cotillion,” he instructed his deputy. “Just tell him it’s a former patient of his. Maybe the news hasn’t reached Norcott yet. If it has, say I’ll be up for a talk later.”
As Larrick went to the telephone on a desk which resembled an oblong chocolate bar, Bounty took a turn about the office, ascertaining that there was no means of exit (or, incidentally, of entrance) save through the anteroom. A second door opened into a small bath. The place was air-conditioned. Outside the closed windows, giving on the court and a side entrance to the court, were substantial bars of iron grillwork.
Bounty tightened his belt and advanced toward the huge shadow on the glass door of the partition between office and anteroom.
E. Matthew Rone was planted squarely between that and the outside door, chewing on a dead cigar. In one of a pair of springy black leather and chromium chairs sat Mr. Palladay. Mr. Palladay looked odd, and, talking to him across the desk, Bounty had had to repress a smile. His face was that of an overly nourished cherub, which fact had been disguised when he came to Las Palmas by an impressive golden beard. It hadn’t taken him long to discover why Valley men are beardless, but he had held out until summer set in in earnest. Now he was clean-shaven, but the lower part of his face was still white, whereas the upper had the pink and blistered look which was the penalty of his first incautious exposure to the sun.
As Bounty closed the door Palladay sprang to his feet, his reedy voice high-pitched and quavery: “Sheriff, I must ask you to remove this man immediately. By the back way. It is a policy of the Sutherland—”
“I know, Palladay: to pretend such things don’t happen in the Valley. I’m more sorry than you that it did happen here. Now your clerk told me a while ago that the man I brought over was in the lobby, near the desk, about nine forty-five last night. You were so interested in that darned check I didn’t get a chance to ask you if you’d seen him then or this afternoon or any other time. What about it?”
“I never saw him before.”
“And you, Mr. Rone?”
Rone’s bushy brows were drawn together, burying his eyes more deeply than ever in flesh. He tilted his cigar up, then down, and said: “I saw your undersheriff, Broddus, pinch him this afternoon. About six. That means you had him in your office an hour and a half.” “Never mind that. How long had Hieronymus been in the lobby when Broddus took him in custody?”
“He’d just come in. Looked in good health too.”
Bounty turned back to Palladay. “Now, Mr. Palladay, I’m going to need this anteroom. Why don’t you go on out and let your guests see how calm and unconcerned you are? You know, the way a ship’s captain does when panic threatens. And you might see if the bellhops or elevator men have anything to report about this man’s movements.” Bounty held open the door into the corridor and flapped a hand. “Just go right on out and take Mr. Rone with you.”
“See here, Bounty!” Rone boomed. “You can’t get away with this. A prisoner faints after you’ve been questioning him in your office. We all know what that means. But when you try to keep it up here—”
“So that’s it, is it?” Bounty’s voice was soft, but his eyes were like little agates as he looked at the hotel detective. “Quick thinking, Rone. Better go sit in the park now and rest your brain. Somebody might hear you if you make speeches like that here. And I know you wouldn’t want that.”
Mr. Palladay had backed across the threshold. “Lummox!” he cried as the closing door forced Rone back and onto his trimly shod toes. “Watch where you’re going.”
Bounty was frowning as he turned to his deputy, who had come out of the office. E. Matthew Rone had been too abstracted to watch where he was treading: a man in the grip of an idea.
“I got Doctor Cotillion,” Larrick said. “He’s on his way down. Norcott answered. He said Chris Hand had just called from the lobby but he hadn’t found out for sure yet that it was Hieronymus who’d collapsed. I had to tell him it was. Lord, Peter, this throws everything out of kilter, doesn’t it? Listen, nobody got near enough to Hieronymus out there in the lobby to poison him in any way, did they? I wasn’t looking at him just before he fell.”
Bounty shook his head ruefully. “Neither was I, son. But I don’t think there’re any darts from blowguns in this case.” He went to a chair, tilted back and locked his hands behind the sleek flaxen hair whose excessive oiliness should have concerned him but didn’t. “I’m afraid,” he said, “this is one of those cases where we have to work on checking up matters like this: Hieronymus was here at the hotel about nine forty-five last night. That was while the guests from the Chicago plane were registering and the clerk was too busy to pay much attention to him. But he thinks Hieronymus looked at the register and then went to the elevators. Now he wouldn’t have got Norcott’s room number from the pages that were open, and the clerk doesn’t think he turned any pages. So we’ll have to do a little study there. I’ve been thinking of that money he had on him and of his return to the hotel this afternoon. Does that give you any bright ideas, son?”
“No,” Larrick said, “that doesn’t give me any ideas.”
Bounty bit into a match. “What were you looking at me that way for, son? It’s the same old face.”
Larrick was at the door, playing with the handle. “You need a haircut,” he said.
“Do I? I’ll get one tomorrow. Tell me about this blonde at the airport. Keep your voice down. Did she recognize Hieronymus?”
“Yes, she saw him go into the telephone booth about five minutes till nine.” Larrick spoke soberly. “Peter, that call to Norcott was before nine. You’re sure of that, aren’t you?”
“No, Bert. The operator marked it down as of nine. When I jogged her memory she said she was several minutes making the connection with Norcott and wasn’t positive whether her record was of the time the call first came or of the time it went through to him. Also she admitted that anything a little on either side of the hour would go down as straight up nine. She finally decided the line was occupied the five minutes before nine. But a lawyer could shake her testimony to pieces. Why, son?” Bounty asked, eying his deputy shrewdly.
“Oh, I just wanted to make sure. It looks as if Norcott would have traced that call, doesn’t it?”
“He did trace it. As soon as the man hung up. That’s how I was able to get on to it. The girl at the switchboard remembered giving Norcott the number it came from.”
“And Norcott didn’t tell you he’d traced it?”
“No.”
“Well,” Larrick went on reluctantly, “I saw Chris Hand out in the lobby tonight and told him where the call came from. It was news to him, I’d swear. That means Norcott held back on him too. And I think I can tell you why. Chris was at the airport at that same time.”
“You’re sure, son?”
“Miss Winters saw him there. I didn’t ask Chris tonight, but I’m sure he went to meet Doctor Cotillion. Norcott would know where he was and when he found out his call came from the same place—well, you see what he must have suspected.”
“I see, son.”
“It’s a rotten business,” Larrick said, opening the door. “I’m going out and receive Doctor Cotillion. Peter, don’t chew on those matches while you’re talking to him. Please.”
“I won’t, son.”
There was pride in Bounty’s eyes as he watched the door close on enough brown tweed to make a suit and a half for him. It wasn’t so long ago that he had had to hale a defiant young sport named Bert Larrick into the sheriff’s office for questioning about a drunken roadhouse brawl. Their session had been a lengthy one but he had got through Bert’s defenses, found the trouble and devised at least a temporary antidote. The lad had just completed his premedic work at the state university when the death of his father, a member of the Border Patrol, had interrupted his studies and thrown him upon his own, to drift in the bitterness of his disappointment into the company of the town’s ne’er-do-wells. Within a week Bounty had pinned a deputy sheriffs badge on a swelling chest. The best day’s work he had ever done, he thought now, knowing that he ought to think about the seamy side of human beings.
Bert had something on his mind and Bounty had an inkling of what it was. This was his first case and he was finding it difficult to keep an official viewpoint on people whom he had known all his life. To be specific, on Christopher Hand….
Bounty got to his feet and his match disappeared as Larrick opened the door, ushered in a robust figure in gray herringbone and said over his shoulder: “Wait out there just a minute, Red.”
Bounty’s ideas concerning metropolitan blood specialists derived largely from newsstand fiction, hence he had expected Dr. Cotillion to present at least a black Van Dyke and pince-nez. Instead Bert was holding the Oxford-gray hat of a hard-bitten businessman. Better still, an army surgeon in mufti, one who has lost his illusions dosing men in outposts with quinine. He had a gritty-looking, slightly puckered chin, and deep lines slanted from his nostrils to draw down the corners of his mouth and throw his full sensuous lips into prominence.
“Doctor Cotillion,” Larrick said with a formality which Bounty didn’t know was his, “this is my superior officer, Sheriff Bounty.”
“Good evening, Sheriff.” No, Cotillion didn’t possess even a silky voice, but one which was gruff and homespun. There was considerable iron-gray in his hair and that hair could do with a bit of trimming as well as Bounty’s.
Bounty shook hands and wished that John Belton Lack had this much of the flesh about him.
“Right in here, Doctor Cotillion,” Larrick said, going to the door of the office.
“One moment, young man.” The gray-brown eyes which still were taking stock of the sheriff were rather jaundiced-looking; their lids had the familiar inflamed and granulated appearance that comes of too much sunlight or of inexperience in meeting the sun. “Your deputy tells me this is one of the blood donors in my recent streptococcus case and that he seems to be suffering from some sort of poisoning. Let me ask just how you came to call me.”
Bounty had his reply ready. “The hotel physician is on his vacation. I learned that you and Doctors Lack and Angelo and Ainsworth were upstairs. Naturally the man preferred that I call you.”
“Doctor Lack didn’t come to our dinner. But no matter. How long have you had this donor under arrest?”
“He’s not under arrest. But he has been held by our office for questioning since six o’clock.”
“What has he had to eat or drink during that time?”
“About seven—an hour ago—I ordered sandwiches and coffee for him. And for myself, I’d better say, Doctor. I noticed no symptoms at all of distress in him while I was with him at the office or while I was bringing him over here in my car. In the lobby he suddenly fell and called for a physician.”
“I’m really not prepared for this emergency. My case, with what it has in it, is at the hospital. But I’ll look at the man. I expect I’d better see him in private.”
Larrick was opening the door. “I’ll go in and turn on some more lights for you and show you where the washroom is,” he said in a hushed voice. “Peter—Mr. Bounty, there’s a bellhop out in the corridor who says he has something to tell me. You might talk to him.”
Bounty opened one door as Larrick closed the other. “Howdy, Red,” he drawled, grinning. “Come on in.”
He knew the freckled bellhop as the kid brother of a pal of Bert’s and wasn’t prepared to see the boy’s eyes bulge at sight of him.
“Where’s Bert?” Red asked in a small voice and edged toward the lobby.
“He’ll be out in a minute. What’s the matter? I haven’t taken to biting.”
The boy stared at him for a time. “They’re sayin’,” he blurted, “you did something to that prisoner of yours. That’s why he fainted and you had to get a doctor.”
Bounty’s face stiffened a little. “Tell’em they’re mistaken, if you want to, Red. You have been standing up for me, haven’t you?”
“Well, yes, Mr. Bounty. But they’re all a-sayin’ it.”
“That makes it hard to do your own thinking, I know. Well, don’t go away. Bert won’t be long.”
Bounty closed the door and blew his nose.
Larrick emerged from the office with disappointment written on his face. “Hieronymus told Doctor Cotillion he wanted me put out of the room,” he said, going to the stand in the corner where he had hung Cotillion’s hat and taking it down to read the manufacturer’s stamp in the crown. “I have a textbook of his on physiology at home,” he informed Bounty reverently.
“Better brush up on it while he’s here, son,” Bounty said, trying to remember just what physiology was. Glancing over the morning paper, he had come upon a write-up, emanating from Dr. Angelo and the pages of Who’s Who, of Clive Cotillion. Just what he was famous for Bounty hadn’t fully comprehended: something to do with the blood stream. Neither had the sheriff heard of the Chicago suburb where he lived nor of the college in which he taught. Cotillion was a college professor; maybe that was why he didn’t sport a Van Dyke….
