“That must have been put out just about the time the house dick was taking over and I’d gone down to register,” Faulkner said. “When I came back and moved into 510 I noticed that sign on the door. I asked Meeker when it had been put there, and Meeker said it was on there as soon as he got squared away and noticed what was going on, but Meeker is a bigger man than I am, and he had trouble fitting himself into the mop closet.”
“When you came back up here, that sign DO NOT DISTURB was on the door?”
“That’s right.”
“That sign wasn’t on the door when you went down?”
“Well... I don’t think it was.”
“Did you ask Meeker about it?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“Said no one had even been near the door of the room.”
“But the sign wasn’t on when you went down in the elevator?”
“I... I don’t think it was.”
Mason turned to Julian, the other detective. “What do you know, Julian?”
“Not a darn thing,” Julian said. “Drake got me about 4:30. I was in bed. He wanted me to drive down to the Imperial Valley for him and I told him nothing doing. Then he wanted to know if I’d come up here and take a job relieving Frank Faulkner here in the hotel. I told him that was okay by me. He wanted to know how soon I could get on the job and I told him I’d have to get some coffee and I should shave. He told me to put a razor in my pocket and come on up and I could shave here. I stopped in an all-night restaurant and grabbed a cup of coffee.”
“Get anything else?”
“No, I wasn’t hungry. I just wanted some coffee. I got up here and — oh, I don’t know, I guess it really was a few minutes after five, but we called it five o’clock in round figures because there was nothing doing, and I told Frank to roll over on the bed and take a snooze and I’d take over for a while. I was getting ready to wake Frank up when you folks came up. I saw you knock on the door and go in, and then...”
“Here’s what we’ve been waiting for,” Drake interrupted. “It’s the law.”
Through the transom could be heard authoritative voices. A door opened and shut-opened again. A man’s voice said, “Let’s dust that doorknob for fingerprints.”
Mason turned to Faulkner. “This woman that went in at 2:23 and out at 2:32. Give me a better description.”‘
“She seemed to me to be two-thirds stockings.”
“That might be a darn good description at that. What about the skirt?”
“It was some sort of a little black and white checkered affair, and there was a coat to match. It was sort of grayish overall but there were little black dots in it, or something. It gave the effect of a very fine plaid with some sort of tan-colored stockings and straight seams and — I think she had on brown shoes.”
“What did she weigh? How tall was she?”
“Oh around five feet two, or three inches. You can just visualize a perfect figure and that’ll be it. She had auburn hair.”
“What’s going on in the corridor, Paul? Have they posted a man on guard?”
Drake, his eye at the periscope, said, “Not in front of the door. They’re all in there. I’ve got to check in with them, Perry. Are you ready?”
“Give me another thirty seconds. Open the corridor door, Paul, take a look down the corridor.”
The detective opened the door, looked down the corridor, then closed the door. “Man on guard at the corridor by the elevator,” he said.
Mason moved over and picked up the telephone. “Bell captain, please,” he said into the transmitter.
A moment later, when he had the bell captain on the line, he inquired, “Say, what’s wrong up here on the fifth floor?”
The bell captain seemed apologetic. “The police are requesting guests who happen to be on the fifth floor to remain in their rooms temporarily. It’ll only be for a moment or two. They’re getting names and addresses of witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what?” Mason asked.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a matter of police routine.”
Mason hung up. Something in the wastebasket caught his eye. He bent down, retrieved two oily cleansing tissues with some red on them. He slipped them into his pocket.
He opened the window, waited for a propitious moment, then scaled his hat far out over the street and closed the window. He crossed the room, opened the door, stepped out into the corridor and walked toward the elevator.
The plain-clothes man stepped forward to bar his way. “I’m sorry, buddy, you’ll have to wait a minute.”
Mason looked at him in surprise. “Wait a minute! What for?”
The man turned back the lapel of his coat and let Mason see the gold shield. “Just a little formality.”
“What’s it all about?”
“I wouldn’t know, but the Chief wants to get the names of people on this floor and ask them if they heard anything last night. It’ll only take a minute.”
Mason said, “Cripes, they rented me a room without a bath and I want to go down to the lobby to the washroom. You can come along with me now if you want.”
“I can’t leave the place here. There’s one on this floor, ain’t there?”
“I guess so,” Mason said. “Oh well, okay. How long’s it going to be?”
“Not over five or ten minutes.”
Mason turned back to the corridor for a step or two, then swung back to the plain-clothes man. “You don’t know where it is, do you?”
“Hell, no, I just got here. It ain’t as though you needed a blueprint. Look at the doors. It’ll have a sign on it that says, men.”
“Thanks,” Mason said, sarcastically. “You’re such a help.”
“Cripes, I ain’t a traffic officer.”
Mason walked along the corridor, ostentatiously looking at each door until he came to the stair door. He opened that tentatively, looked back at the plain-clothes man. When he saw that the officer seemed to see nothing alarming in this, Mason walked through the stair door and took the stairs two at a time. There was no watcher in the sixth floor corridor, but Mason went up to the seventh floor and then to the eighth, just to be on the safe side. At the eighth floor he pressed the button which summoned the elevator, stepped in casually and was whisked down to the lobby.
Mason paused at the newsstand, then at the travel desk, walked over to the stand marked THEATER TICKETS, then stepped out of the door and onto the sun-swept sidewalk.
“Taxi?” a doorman asked.
Mason nodded.
Chapter number 8
Mason paid off the cab in the six hundred block of East Lagmore Street and walked down to 791. It was a rooming house, the street frontage of which consisted entirely of a flight of stairs over which hung a somewhat dilapidated electric sign.
Mason ran up these stairs, found a desk, a register, a key rack with places for some two dozen keys, and a dome-shaped hand bell, back of which was a sign, ring bell for landlady. Mason thumbed through the register, found the name of Arthur Sheldon listed as being in room number five and marked paid.
The lawyer located room five and knocked.
Sheldon opened it. His face showed surprise. “You?”
Mason entered the room, pushed the door shut behind him.
It was a typical cheap room with a white iron bedstead that had been repainted at least once with cheap enamel. A thin mattress sagged in the center. The walls were stained and soiled. The lace curtains had been darned several times, enamel had been chipped off the washstand, and one of the rungs had pulled loose from the straight-backed chair by the window. A rocker, stained a nondescript dark yellow, with a concave seat of imitation leather, tried bravely to give the room an appearance of livability.
Sheldon sat down on the edge of the thin mattress, which promptly sagged down so that the iron side of the bedstead caught him on the underside of the knees. He motioned to Mason to sit in the rocking chair, but the lawyer declined the invitation with a shake of his head and remained standing.