On the other hand … But her reflections were interrupted by a knock on the door and Miss Cabot’s inevitable “Oh dear!”
Gilligan jumped up. “I’ll get it, ma’am. That better be Larssen or … Hey, where you bin, Larssen?”
“Downtown to get the mug book, Sergeant. You sent me, remember?”
“Smart-ass! You wanna get busted back to patrolman? O.K., Mrs. Fletcher, Lambert, lessee can you pick out the guy you saw.”
“Me?” Lambert protested. “I didn’t see his face.”
“Maybe sumpin’ll jog your memory.” Gilligan took the heavy tome over to Miss Genevieve’s desk.
Daisy sat down at the desk, with Lambert leaning over her shoulder. They studied lean, mean faces and broad,brutal faces, coldly intelligent or piggishly stupid, some smooth-shaven, some with several days’ growth of beard. Several were nondescript, but not in quite the same way the man on the stairs had been nondescript, Daisy was sure. She tried to picture each topped with a bowler hat.
Her concentration was not assisted by Lambert’s mutinous mutter in her ear, over and over: “But Ididn’tsee his face.”
They were nearing the end of the book when again there came a knocking at the door, a peremptory rat-tat-tat.
“O’Rourke’s found sumpin!” said Gilligan hopefully, striding towards the foyer as Larssen opened the door.
Daisy heard a babble of voices, one shrill and female and vaguely familiar. She and Lambert turned to watch the sergeant.
“Who … ? What … ?” he said in bewilderment.
“Patrolman Hicks, Sergeant. I nabbed ’em,” a proud voice announced. “They was trying to sneak into Carmody’s room!”
11
Sergeant Gilligan backed into the Cabots’ sitting room. After him swirled a petite woman in a scarlet coat trimmed with white fur, and a scarlet cloche with white feathers—definitely the hat Daisy had seen going down in the lift. Her scolding voice Daisy identified as belonging to the woman who had shouted at Carmody. Framed by the luxurious fur, her delicate features were twisted now in anger, but expertly made up and probably very pretty when good tempered, or in repose. She carried a large lizard-skin handbag, no doubt full of cosmetics.
Half a pace behind her came a man in a calf-length grey overcoat with an astrakhan collar. Of middle height, he had a plump, overfed face presently greasy with sweat. He was worried, even afraid. The hat he carried was a homburg, not a bowler, Daisy noted.
Behind the pair towered Patrolman Hicks, beaming. He was the uniformed policeman Daisy had last seen, looking bored, idly strolling along the passage outside her hotel room.
“This is an outrage!” screeched the woman.
Rosenblatt moved forward. “What’s going on? I’m Rosenblatt, Deputy District Attorney in charge of the Carmody case,” he explained when the couple and the patrolman all looked at him askance. “What’s up, ma’am?”
They all started talking at once.
“I was guarding Carmody’s door, sir,” Hicks reported, saluting, “like I was sent to, and …”
“I am Otis Carmody’s wife,” Mrs. Carmody affirmed icily. “I just wanted to retrieve …”
“Don’t say another word, honey baby,” bleated her gentleman friend, presumably Barton Bender. “I’ll telephone my …”
“Hold it, hold it!” said Rosenblatt. “There’s no need for lawyers, sir. I’m not planning anything but a friendly little chat here. Excuse me, ma’am, I better take the patrolman’s report first so he can go back to his post.”
“I was guarding Carmody’s room, sir,” Hicks repeated stolidly, “like I was sent to, and these guys come along and the dame takes a key outta her purse and sticks it in the keyhole and starts to turn it. So I tells ‘em the room’s closed by police orders for investigation of a homicide and I gotta take ’em down to Centre Street. I says nice and polite they can come quiet or I can get out the cuffs, and they come all right but quiet ain’t the word! Geez, that dame that looks like a wind’d blow her away ain’t never stopped cussing me out since … O.K., sir, I guess you don’ wanna hear all that.”
“You can write it all down in your report. How did you end up here instead of headquarters?”
“The elevator boy tol’ me Sergeant Gilligan’s here, sir.”
“And what I want to know,” put in the sergeant, “is how come the key was already in the lock when you stopped ’em if you was standing guard?”
“Geez, Sergeant,” said Hicks with an injured look, “if I‘d’ve stood right by the door alla time, there wouldn’t no one have tried to get in. They’d’ve seen me and turned around right when they stepped out of the elevator and gone back down and we wouldn’t never have knowed who they was. I went a ways along the corridor and waited where they couldn’t see me but I could keep an eye on things, see.”
In the linen room—Daisy was prepared to bet—chatting with Bridget.
