Finally, when it was obvious no one was going to answer the phone, I tried the knob. Finding the door unlocked, I pushed it open. A quick glance from the doorway showed no one in the room. The phone, on a stand this side of the bed, continued to ring. Crossing to it, I lifted it from its cradle and said, “Yes?”
“Willard?” asked Isobel’s voice.
“Yes?” I said again.
Her voice was breathless. “That Moon man knows who you are. I think he’s on his way up.”
Fausta had moved from the doorway past the foot of the bed to the windows. Something in her manner caused my gaze to jump at her. She was standing rigid, an expression of shock on her face at something on the floor beyond my range of vision.
In a toneless voice I said into the phone, “Thanks,” and hung up.
Then, rounding the bed, I stared down at the body of Willard Knight, alias Roger Neltson, alias George Smith.
He lay flat on his back between the bed and the windows, his eyes wide open but sightless. His mouth sagged open too, and the lips had drawn back from his strong teeth to give him an expression of gaping wonder. The whole front of his shirt was soaked with blood from a wound in his chest. His body and the floor immediately around it was sprinkled with feathers.
At Knight’s feet lay the pillow from which the feathers had come, a powder-blackened hole indicating it had been used by the killer to muffle the sound of the shot.
Taking Fausta by the arm, I led her to the door. “Wait for me at the bar,” I told her, pushed her out into the hall and shut the door in her face.
Then I made a systematic search of the room.
A pigskin travelling bag containing a few changes of linen and toilet supplies was all the luggage I found. There were no papers of any sort in it or anywhere else in the room.
Finally I turned to the body. A wallet contained slightly over a hundred dollars in currency, several lodge membership cards and a driver’s license issued to Willard Knight. His pockets yielded the usual assortment of keys, pocket knife, cigarette lighter and small change, but only one item of any interest.
In his pants pocket I found a duplicate deposit slip issued by the Riverside Bank showing a deposit made only that day to the account of the Jones and Knight Investment Company.
The amount shown was seventy thousand dollars.
Putting everything back the way I had found it, I lifted the phone and asked for the house detective.
IX
“You had him right in your arms!” Day yelled at me. “Once you even had him unconscious!” He drew a deep breath. “So you just stood around until he woke up and took off.”
He was leaning over my chair, his nose approximately an inch from mine so that he could be sure I heard him clearly. Hannegan, bending above me from the other side, snorted, “Hah!” and walked over to lean against a wall.
“Can you give me any explanation at all why you didn’t report Knight in the first time you saw him?” Day asked in a controlled voice.
“Didn’t recognize him,” I said for the twenty-seventh time. “I didn’t have a description of Knight and had never seen his picture. I should have had, but I muffed it and I’m not making any excuses. I just wasn’t awake. I can’t be a genius all the time.”
“Hah!” Hannegan snorted again.
“If anyone else disappears during this investigation,” I said, “I’ll memorize his description and carry his photograph next to my heart. Why don’t you admit what you’re really mad about is Knight not being Lancaster’s killer, so you could close the case.”
“I never said he was Lancaster’s killer!” the inspector half yelled. “He was only a suspect.”
“And now who have you got?” I asked. “A hood who’s cagey enough to stay across the river until the heat dies down.”
“Seldon didn’t bump Knight,” Day muttered. “The Illinois cops have been tailing him for me, and he was at a dinner in Madden, Illinois with fifty other people when Knight got it.”
“All his guns got alibis too?” I asked dryly.
The inspector rubbed his head wearily. “I know Seldon’s alibi doesn’t mean anything. But Knight’s death doesn’t necessarily remove Knight as a suspect in the Lancaster killing either. Maybe he bumped Lancaster and the Jones woman bumped him.”
“Oh for cripes sake!” I said.
“According to you she was gone from the bar about ten minutes after Knight went upstairs,” he said doggedly. “She says she went to the ladies’ lounge, but she could just as easily have spent the time knocking off her lover.”
“The elevator operator would have remembered taking her up. And don’t tell me she walked fourteen flights, shot the guy and walked down again, all in ten minutes.”
“The elevator operator took lots of people up and down last night,” Day growled. “He wouldn’t remember one lone woman.”
“He would a good-looking one like Isobel Jones. Bet you ten bucks if you ask him about Fausta going up with me, he’ll remember her.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” the inspector said with such lack of conviction I was convinced he had already discovered the elevator boy recalled Fausta. But to myself I had to admit only a dead man would have missed her in that dress.
“Mrs. Jones phoned Knight I was on my way up,” I told him for the dozenth time. “She didn’t even know he was dead.”
“Maybe a cover-up,” he muttered. “Anyway, we’re holding her awhile.”
“What’s her husband think?”
Frowning at his ash tray, the inspector began to search for a long butt. “He thinks we’re the Gestapo, apparently. Doesn’t believe his wife had a lover. Doesn’t believe his partner would have deceived him even if his wife would. If he wasn’t so upset, he’d have had a lawyer down here prying her out of jail, but apparently it never occurred to him. He hung around here half the night waiting for somebody to let him see her.”
“Why don’t you let him?”
“We will, soon as we get a straight story from Mrs. Jones.” Finding a cigar butt which suited him, the inspector blew it free of ashes and stuffed it in his mouth. “So far she insists she met Knight accidentally. Claims she went to bed last night the same time as her husband, couldn’t sleep and got up to take a walk. She dropped into the Sheridan simply because it was close to her home, and ran into Knight at the bar. When we jumped her about seeing him there the previous evening when she was with you, she blandly explained she assumed he had just dropped in for a drink, and she didn’t realize he was staying there. The reason she gives for introducing him by a fake name is as screwy as the rest of her statement. She says she knew you and the police were hunting Knight, and if she identified him, she’d be called as a witness. Then her husband would discover she’d been out with you instead of home in bed.”
Knowing both the inspector and Hannegan had been up half the night questioning Isobel, I couldn’t repress a grin, for I could visualize how her faintly mad manner must have slowly driven them both toward insanity. Day scowled when he saw the grin, and I erased it hurriedly.
“What did you make of the bank deposit slip in Knight’s pocket?” I asked.
“We haven’t made anything of it yet. I sent a man over to Riverside Bank when it opened, but he isn’t back yet. Jones didn’t know what it meant either. I sprang it on him about nine this morning and he nearly had a conniption fit. He took off in the direction of the bank like a scared rabbit.”
The phone rang at that moment and the inspector answered it. “Day,” he said, then grunted twice and hung up.