“What is it? A bruise?”
“Just a little one. Did you get a look at him?”
“No. Did you?”
“No, it was too dark, and it all happened so fast. Who do you think he was? A burglar?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I glanced around the room. The coffee table was kicked around at an off-angle near the sofa, but nothing else looked to be disturbed. Nor did anything look out of place in what I could see of the bedroom. There was a connecting door in one wall between this suite and the one on the south side; most of the larger rooms in the Continental had them-an old-fashioned custom for the easy creation of “apartments” for the wealthier clientele. But this one was locked on this side and on the other side too, and it did not look to have been tampered with. “Can you tell if anything’s missing?”
Kerry shook her head. “Cybil’s suitcase is open, but she might have left it that way herself; it doesn’t look rummaged through.”
“You’d better call Suite M and tell her and your father what happened. Have them come back here and check things over before they notify the management.”
“What are you going to do?”
“There’s something I want to check on myself. I’ll be back pretty soon.” I retreated to the door. “Lock it after me this time, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “But you’re making me nervous. Do you know something I don’t?”
“No,” I said, truthfully enough. “I’d tell you if I did.”
I went out, waited until I heard the click of the latch, and then hustled to the elevators and took one up to the sixth floor. Dancer had told me his room was 617; I found the door to it tucked inside one of those little cul-de-sacs you find in older hotels-a blind corridor maybe fifteen feet long, with two doors facing each other across it and a third door, probably to some kind of storage or maid’s closet, at the end.
There were no lights showing through the bottom louvers and no sounds from within when I put my ear against the panel. I knocked, waited for fifteen seconds, and knocked again with more emphasis. Nothing. If he was inside he was either passed out or just not opening up for anybody.
For no good reason I went from there back up to the fifteenth floor and poked my head into Suite M. The party was just about over; there were only eight or nine people left, none of them Russ Dancer. I went inside and asked Lloyd Underwood and Bert Praxas if they’d seen him in the past half-hour or knew where he’d gone. They said no.
So what? I asked myself as I hiked back to the elevators. Not being around doesn’t make him guilty of anything; he doesn’t have to be the one. Hell, it could be anybody. How many people in this city are running around tonight with whiskey fumes on their breath?
But I still wished I knew where Dancer was and where he’d been twenty minutes ago.
I could hear voices inside 1017 when I got back down to there, and it was Ivan Wade who opened up in answer to my knock. If he was upset or worried over what had happened, you could not tell it by looking at him. He wore the same aloof expression he had earlier.
He said, “Come inside. How’s your chin?”
“Sore.”
“I’m sorry it had to happen.”
“Me too. Did you find anything missing?”
“I don’t think so. My wife’s still checking.”
Kerry was standing behind him, near the couch, and when I was all the way inside she said, “Find out much on your errand?”
“No. Nothing.”
Wade said, “It was a sneak thief, I suppose.”
“Well, that’s a possibility.”
“Why a possibility? Who else could it have been?”
“Maybe it was your would-be extortionist, Dad,“Kerry said. “The one behind those letters and ‘Hoodwink’ manuscripts.”
Wade’s eyes narrowed. “That whole business is a hoax,” he said.
“Is it?”
“Of course it is. Besides, why would an extortionist break into our room?”
I said, “Did you or your wife bring anything valuable with you from home? I don’t just mean money and jewelry; I mean literary material-rare pulps, manuscripts, anything like that.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing of any special value.”
Cybil came out of the bedroom just then with her arms folded, hands against forearms, under her breasts. Her husband may have been taking this thing pretty calmly, but she wasn’t; there was anxiety in the way she moved and in the set of her face. Her lipstick was flaked and spotty where she’d worried it off with her teeth.
“Everything still there?” Wade asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure I closed my suitcase before we left for the party and the lid is raised now, but nothing inside seems to have been touched. I suppose whoever it was didn’t have time.”
Kerry said, “What could he have been after in your suitcase?”
“God knows.” But there was hesitation before she said it.
“Well, no damage done then,” Wade said. “Or at least not much damage. The best thing to do is notify the hotel manager and then forget it all happened.1’
Cybil gave him a sharp bright look. “Why do we have to notify the hotel manager?”
“It’s standard procedure, Mrs. Wade,” I told her.
She gnawed off a little more paint from her lower lip. She had things preying on her mind, you could see that-and it was not just the breaking-and-entering. Kerry had said she was a tough lady, as tough as Max Ruffe, and I believed it; and tough ladies don’t get themselves all worked up over a minor burglary attempt, not unless they suspect it isn’t so minor after all.
“Well, I’d rather not make a fuss about it,” she said finally.
“There won’t be a fuss,” Wade said. “We’ll ask the manager to be discreet.”
“Can’t we at least wait until morning?”
Wade glanced at me and I shrugged. He said to Cybil, “All right, in the morning. It’s getting late and we’re all tired.”
Kerry took that as a cue for us to leave. And a couple of minutes later, after the goodnights, we were alone together in the hallway. She said, “I seem to have lost my appetite. Raincheck on Rosebud’s, okay?”
“Sure. But how about a cup of coffee downstairs? It’s still early yet.”
“Well… just one, maybe.”
The lobby coffee shop was still open, and we took one of several fancy white wrought-iron tables surrounded by potted plants; the place was called, rather snootily for a hotel coffee shop, the Garden Bistro. Kerry sat studying me as I gave our order to the waitress, and she kept on studying me for some seconds afterward.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she said.
“Why do you think I’m not telling you something.”
“Intuition. You don’t exactly have a poker face, you know.”
“I always thought I did.”
“Well, you don’t. What did you do on that errand of yours?”
I hesitated. I could be frank with her, but that would mean mentioning the.38 revolver in her mother’s purse. If she didn’t already know about it, and the odds were she didn’t, it might upset her. Still, if Cybil was courting some kind of trouble, she had a right to know about it. And maybe she could help me find out just what it was that was going on here.
“Well?” she said.
“Okay. I went to see if I could find Russ Dancer.”
“Why? You don’t suspect him, do you?”
“Not actively. But the intruder had alcohol on his breath, and not just the kind from one or two social drinks. That made me think of Dancer.”
“You mean because of the way he feels about Cybil? My God, you weren’t thinking rape or anything like that?”
“The thought did cross my mind.”
“Well, you — can forget it, believe me. Dancer would never hurt Cybil; never. He worships her.”
“Worship can turn into hatred sometimes.”
“Yes, but not in Dancer’s case. I can see it in his eyes-how he feels about her.”
“Did you know Dancer before you met him here?”
“No. But Cybil told me enough about him to give me a good idea of what to expect. Men like Russ Dancer are easy to read.”
Not for me, they weren’t. But I said, “Does Cybil do a lot of reminiscing about the old days?”