She stood there, a rigid, frightened figure, watching the stairs and listening.
Jay must have moved very quickly and silently, for she heard nothing and alarmed at the time he seemed to be taking, she was about to turn when she heard the swish of the elevator door as it closed and a moment later, the whining sound that told her the elevator was in motion.
She looked around and stared down the corridor at the red indicator light that showed the elevator was climbing.
For a moment or so she remained still, then she walked unsteadily back to the suite.
She entered and closed the door, then she went into Jay’s room.
The cupboard doors stood open. She looked into the cupboard, feeling a cold cramped sensation in her stomach. There was nothing in the cupboard to show that a dead girl had lain there for more than twelve hours.
Leaving the room, she went back into the lounge and sat down. She felt cold and sick and very tired. She shut her eyes, letting her head drop back against the head-rest of the chair.
She remained like that for a long five minutes, then she heard the door open and she looked up.
Jay came in. He closed the door and locked it. He was pale and his upper lip shone with sweat.
They looked at each other.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded as he took out his handkerchief and wiped his hands and wrists.
“Yes. No one saw me. I took the elevator to the top floor and left it there. I didn’t meet anyone on the way down.”
“The police will be here soon. There will be an investigation. What about your fingerprints in the elevator?”
He shrugged impatiently.
“Hundreds of people use the elevator. I’m not worried about that.”
“What have you done with her beads?”
“I’ve thrown them into the sea.”
“Are you sure nothing of hers has been left here?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Didn’t she have a handbag?”
“No.”
“Are you quite sure? Girls always have handbags, Jay.”
“She didn’t. I’m sure.”
Sophia began to relax a little. Perhaps after all it would be all right, she thought. How could the police guess the girl had died in this suite? Surely their name and reputation would put them beyond suspicion?
“Then we must hope, Jay. I’m going to bed now.”
“Thank you for helping me,” Jay said. “You don’t have to worry. No one saw me.”
But there he was wrong.
Joe Kerr had seen Sophia leave the suite and press the elevator call button. He had watched her move furtively down the corridor to the head of the stairs and look over the banister rail.
He had leaned forward, blankly surprised, wondering what she was doing when he saw Jay come unsteadily out of the suite with Lucille Balu slung limply over his shoulder.
Joe recognized the girl’s blue and white dress and the colour of her hair.
He was so surprised to see Jay carrying the girl out of the suite that he remained transfixed and it wasn’t until it was too late that he groped for his camera. By then the elevator door had closed and the elevator had begun to climb.
He watched Sophia come back along the corridor and as she passed under one of the ceiling lights, he saw how bad she looked; as if she were going to faint.
He waited.
A few minutes later, he saw Jay come down the stairs, walk across the corridor to the door of suite 27, open the door and disappear inside. He heard the key turn in the lock.
Still Joe sat motionless, staring with his frog-like, watery eyes at the door to suite 27.
His drink-sodden brain took some time before it accepted the evidence of his eyes and even then, he was suspicious of what he had seen.
He had been waiting outside the door of Delaney’s suite for a long time, and, as the hours had passed, he had become resigned to the fact that he was wasting his time, as he had wasted it so often on some hopeless assignment he had hoped would turn out to be something that would interest Manley and make him some money.
Lucille Balu had walked into the suite at four o’clock in the afternoon. This boy, Jay Delaney, had carried her out, apparently unconscious, twelve hours later and had taken her upstairs in the elevator.
Why was she unconscious? What had been happening to her during those twelve hours?
Joe grappled with this puzzle, his mind baffled.
Obviously, Floyd Delaney’s high-toned wife was in the secret. She had acted as a scout, making sure the way was clear for the boy to get the unconscious girl out of the suite.
Had the girl been drugged or made drunk so the boy could seduce her? Joe wondered. Surely a woman like Sophia Delaney wouldn’t have associated herself with such a situation?
But the fact remained that the girl had been in the suite for twelve hours and had been carried out unconscious.
If he could prove that young Delaney had drugged the girl and Sophia Delaney had assisted in such an act, what a story it would make!
Unsteadily he got to his feet.
Where had the boy taken her? he wondered. He was pretty sure the girl wasn’t staying at the hotel. Where had she been dumped to sleep off the effects of the drug or drink the boy had plied her with?
Joe moved out of his hiding place and walked softly down the corridor to the elevator, then, deciding it might be dangerous to bring the elevator down to that floor, he started up the stairs to the floor above.
He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the third floor. Stair climbing and a diet of two bottles of whisky a day didn’t agree with him.
He thumbed the elevator button and, leaning against the wall, he waited for the elevator to descend, planning to start on the top floor and search any empty room he found until he discovered the girl.
A few seconds later, he was standing rigid, sweat on his face, as he stared down at Lucille Balu’s dead body.
She lay on her back, her legs bent, her skirts above her knees. There was a look of frozen terror on her blood-congested face that sent a chill up Joe’s spine. Around her throat was the mark of a cord that had been pulled brutally tight, leaving a deep impression on her brown, tender skin. Her long slim fingers were hooked in agony; her eyes, starting out of her head, were fixed in the impersonal stare of death.
Joe felt a sudden thump of pain at his heart as he looked at the dead girl. The pain made him giddy and faint. He took a step back, grimacing. For some moments he stood motionless, aware that the shock had been a dangerous one and that his heart, which he had suspected for some time, had reacted badly. Then, making an effort, he turned and started a slow, shambling retreat down the corridor to the stairs.
The night clerk who sat the reception desk, idly turning the pages of Paris-Match, was surprised to see Joe lurch down the stairs and cross unsteadily to the revolving doors that led out to the Croisette.
He recognized Joe and grimaced. He supposed that Joe had been somewhere upstairs sleeping off a bout of drinking and he watched him manoeuvre himself through the revolving doors with a feeling of relief that Joe wasn’t going to make a nuisance of himself.
Joe kept walking: his brain frozen and numbed.
It wasn’t until he had reached the Beau Rivage hotel, a fifth-rate hotel in Rue Foch, where he was staying and had got up to his bedroom that he recovered sufficiently from the shock to begin to analyse what he had seen.
Twenty years ago, Joe had been the crime reporter on the New York Inquirer. During the four years he had worked on the paper, he had photographed innumerable bodies, murdered violently. He had become hardened to the horrors he had had to see. Also, he had been able to tell at a glance how the unfortunates he had had to photograph had died.
He knew that Lucille Balu had been strangled by a cord that had been looped around her throat and then pulled tight. From her congested face, the marks around her throat and her expression of agony, he had no doubt that she had been murdered.