He lay for minutes in the hallway below, thinking things over. Then he got painfully to his feet, opened the hall door and went outside. He stood for a minute in the wind, shivering, his teeth knocking. A cab came along and he flagged it and said, “Go to the Carioca Club.”
They had closed, padlocked the Carioca, daylight its façade looked tarnished, drab, and the street itself was no beauty spot. The shutters had been closed, the canvas marquee removed.
Kennedy leaned against a pole across the street, eying the building as though he hoped to wring some secret from its yellow brick walls. There was no evidence of anyone being about. The building yawned with desertion. After a while he turned up his collar, crossed the street and followed the service alley-way to the rear of the building, to a square cindered yard. There were a dozen garbage drums lined up, waiting to be removed. He tried a couple of windows but they were locked. He tried a couple of doors. They were locked also. He blew his breath into his cold hands, drummed his cold feet. He tried a third door and almost fell down when it swung inward at his touch. Instead of entering immediately, he remained on the threshold, pondering. Then he stepped in, closed the door quietly.
He was in a small room and there were half a dozen battered easy chairs standing around. There was a phone on the wall and against the wall a table littered with magazines. A door leading from this room was ajar. He sauntered through it and into a narrower room fitted with rods and coat hangers and on some of these hangers there were ballet dresses. There was daylight, but it was dim, feeble.
Suddenly he found himself on the small stage, with the vast sweep of the main dining-room before him. A rectangular skylight admitted light but could not dispel the gloom of the place. Wreckage was still scattered all over the dance floor. Nothing apparently had been removed, or even straightened. The inside of the building was, without the aid of incandescents, more drab than the outside.
Taking his time, he crossed the dance-floor to the table at which Marty Sullivan had died. He stepped into the narrow doorway there, reached out to the point where the chair on which Sullivan had sat still stood. He nodded to himself, then entered the corridor which gave off the doorway. He followed this rearward to a point outside the dressing-room, where he remembered he had left Dan Osborne.
There was an L in the corridor and he took it, feeling his way now, for no daylight penetrated here. He stopped short when small sounds came to his ears. He did not move for a full two minutes. The sounds were nearby, small, unsteady, erratic. With his fingertips feeling along the wall, he proceeded. Suddenly he was in front of an open doorway and saw beyond, in a small room, a glowing flashlight aimed downward on a littered desk. A small hand, white-gloved, was scattering papers to left and right.
A woman’s hand. He could tell that she was slender. Vagrant offshoots of the flashlight’s glow showed him, intermittently, a young woman’s face, lean, desperate-lipped. A cloth coat of some dark red material with a thick fur collar. On her head, cocked over one eye, a moderated shako. She was, he thought, very good-looking in a strange, black-eyed, desperate way.
He did not enter the room. He did not make his presence known. Slowly, step by step, he backed up, then turned and made his way cautiously back to the main corridor. He left by the door through which he had entered the building, walked to the street and entered a bar a few doors away. He ordered rye and stood at the front end of the bar, where he could see the alleyway of the Carioca.
“The cops sure mopped that place up across the street,” the bartender said.
“Yeah,” said Kennedy.
“The bums.”
“Yeah.”
“But I see they got theirs. That flat-foot MacBride, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Ever since I’m a kid I have got no use for cops. They’re bums.”
Kennedy threw a half-dollar on the bar, picked up the fifteen cents in change and watched the girl in the black shako walk past. She looked lean, lithe, muscular. He opened the door and drifted into the street and followed her, though you would never have guessed he was following anybody. Though she walked rapidly he could tell that she was watching for a cab. One came along, but he was nearer, so he grabbed it. There were not many cabs afield in this neighborhood.
Kennedy said to the driver, “I’m going to get off at the next block. Make a right turn and stop. The girl in the funny hat we just passed is looking for a cab. She’ll see you parked there and probably want to get in. When she gives you the address, say you’re hired.”
“Nix. It ain’t legal.”
Kennedy showed him his press card. “How’d you like to get your picture in the paper and a notice saying you’re the most polite driver in the city?”
“Was that the dame we just passed?”
There was a cigar store on the corner and Kennedy, leaving the cab, went in to get a deck of cigarettes. Through the glass door he saw the girl approach the cab, pull open the cab’s door and say something to the driver. The driver shrugged. The girl made an impatient gesture and walked on. Kennedy went out.
The driver said, “Six-fourteen Westland.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Six-fourteen Westland.”
The cab swung around in the middle of the street end headed westward through the city, skirting the untidy hem of Little Italy. Fifteen minutes later it wheeled into Westland, in the two-hundred block. As it pulled up, four blocks beyond, in front of the Somerset Home, Kennedy saw Dan Osborne come out of the doorway, cross the sidewalk and climb into a Ford coupe, which he drove off.
The Somerset was an old hotel that had been refurbished during the past year. It was second-rate, showy, with a popular coffee shop and a rowdy bar. A lot of traveling men stopped there. The rates were low, the hotel was convenient to the trolley lines, buses, and the shopping center, and it had a lot of sample rooms. It did a thriving business.
“Well, this must be six-fourteen,” the driver said, squinting. “I wonder why the hell she didn’t just say the Somerset.”
“You sure you got the number right?”
“Sure I got the number. I pride meself on gettin’ numbers right.”
Kennedy climbed out, paid up and meandered into the garish lobby. He was still puzzled about Osborne. Not that Osborne didn’t have a right to come in or go out of the Somerset; but under the circumstances...
Kennedy shrugged. He considered the possibility of snatching a drink, but the bar was downstairs, at the other end of the lobby, and he gave up the idea. He placed himself just inside the main entrance, and when, five minutes later, he saw the girl alight from a cab he crossed to the desk, showed his press card and said:
“Is Benedictine Krause, the actress, stopping here?”
“Benedictine Krause?” the clerk asked, puzzled.
“She’s that new Alsatian actress. I heard she was in town. I’m trying to find out where she’s staying.”
“I never heard of Benedictine Krause.”
“Sorry,” said Kennedy, and turning leisurely, broke open a packet of cigarettes.
The girl in the black shako came up to the panel beside the desk and picked up one of three house phones. Kennedy heard her say:
“Mr. Webb, please.” And in a moment: “Joel?... Inez. Listen, Joel,” she said in a taut, fearful voice, “I didn’t find it... Yes, everywhere... Everywhere, I tell you!... I’m down here in the lobby... I just came from there... No, no, Joel! I tell you I looked everywhere! There’s no use talking over the phone this way. I’ll come up... But I must see you!... Well, all right... All right... But make sure you call me.”