Chapter 7
Mason once more paced the floor of the hotel bedroom, plainly showing impatience.
He had only a few minutes to wait.
Exactly seven minutes and five seconds from the time the door had closed on the departing figure of the young woman, fingertips tapped gently on the panel of the door, an all but inaudible knock.
Mason detoured in his floor-pacing to twist the knob and pull the door open.
Paul Drake, somewhat disheveled, in need of a shave, grinned at Mason and said in a low voice, “Okay, Perry.”
Mason said, “Did you get...?” He ceased talking as Drake placed a warning finger to his lips and pushed his way into the room.
“What gives?” Mason asked in a low voice.
“She’s still here in the hotel,” Drake said.
“You got on the job yourself?”
“I had to, Perry, I couldn’t get the people here in time, and I jumped into my clothes and beat it up here as fast as I could. At that, I didn’t do you any good.”
“How come?”
“The girl who handles my switchboard was planted in the corridor. She had to register and get a room in order to do the job we wanted. She put on a maid’s cap and an apron and was out in the corridor when your girl came out. In place of taking the elevator down to he lobby, however, the way we had expected, this jane took the elevator up.”
“Oh-oh,” Mason said.
“Now there is only one floor above this,” Drake said, “so my operative felt she could take to the stairs and not be too far behind. Of course, she’d figured the lay of the land the first thing she did and before the action started, so she knew her way around.”
Mason nodded.
“She sprinted up the stairs, opened the door and was only a second or two behind the elevator. Your girl was walking down the corridor. She stopped in front of 815, took a key from her purse, opened the door and walked in. My operative ran on tiptoe down the corridor and was in time to hear the door being locked from the inside.”
“So then what?”
“So then she listened at the door long enough to hear low voices, one of them a man’s voice. Evidently that jane is registered there in room 815. We had no signals to cover that emergency, so my operative had to dash down to where I was sitting in my car to tell me what had happened and ask for instructions. I felt the hotel room was all the address you needed and I couldn’t leave my office switchboard shut off any longer, so I sent my girl back to the office and I came up to report. I stopped by the desk long enough to find out that room. 815 is rented to a Mrs. Madison Kerby.”
“The clerk suspicious of you?” Mason asked.
“The hell with him,” Drake said. “This is one of those dumps. If he’d said anything I’d have told him where he got off at. I presume they’re more or less accustomed to having private detectives crawling over the place.”
“You mean he knows you’re a private detective?”
“Hell, no. I let him think I was on the make. I slipped him a couple of bucks. Frankly, Perry, I don’t think he gave a damn.”
“So she’s here in the hotel,” Mason said.
Drake nodded. “It both complicates and simplifies things, Perry. As I tried to point out to you, we’re short-handed. I’d instructed my operative to put the finger on the jane who came out of this room and to signal me so I could...”
“How was she going to do that, Paul?”
“Simple enough. My operative registered and insisted on getting a room at the front of the building. As soon as your party took the elevator down my operative was going to run into her room, open the window and shine the beam of a flashlight down on my car. I had my rear-view side mirror so adjusted that as soon as the beam of the flashlight hit that it would be reflected in my eyes.”
“Nice going,” Mason said.
“Just routine,” Drake told him, and yawned.
“Well, we’ve run our quarry to earth,” Mason said.
“She’s Dixie...”
Mason grinned. “She said she was Dixie.”
“Well?” Drake asked.
Mason shook his head.
“What are you getting at?”
Mason pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, said, “Here are three stains of lipstick marked numbers one, two and three. What do you make of them, Paul?”
“You must have had a busy night,” Drake said.
“Never mind the wisecracks. What do you make of this lipstick? Is it all the same?”
“Two of them are the same. One might be just a little lighter than the other. I’d say — no, wait a minute — they’re all the same. I’d say they were all the same shade.”
“So would I,” Mason said.
“You mean you’ve been necking with three different gals?” Drake asked.
Mason pulled the lipstick from his pocket, said, “Smear number one was removed from the lips of the girl who claims to be Dixie Dayton. Smear number two was taken from the writing on the bottom of the table here, and smear number three was taken from this lipstick.”
“Writing on the bottom of the table?” Drake asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Mason picked the table up, gently turned it over, and Paul Drake looked at the writing on the bottom of the table and whistled, then said, “How the devil did you happen to find it there, Perry?”
“ ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ ” Mason said, grinning. “This lipstick was lying on the floor. You notice it’s a gold-plated tube of lipstick. It caught and reflected the light. Only a blind man could have missed it.”
“All right,” Drake said, “I still don’t see how it happened that you looked at the bottom of the table.”
“Take a look at this lipstick,” Mason said. “A woman’s lips are smooth. This lipstick was drawn across something rough which grooved deep lines in it and made it overlap the edges.
“So naturally I started looking around to see what the lipstick had been used on besides a person’s lips.”
“And you found this table,” Drake said.
Mason nodded.
“Now wait a minute,” Drake said, “this may be on the level, Perry. You were supposed to meet Morris Alburg here?”
“That’s right.”
“And— What the hell, Alburg and some woman, perhaps Dixie Dayton, were here in this room. Somebody slipped in and had a gun trained on them, and...”
“You’ll notice the imprint of the gun on the bedspread,” Mason said. “It’s quite plain.”
Drake followed the direction of Mason’s finger and said, “Damned if it isn’t, Perry... My gosh, that does it! That really ties the thing up! They sat here. They knew they were going to be taken for a ride. They wanted to leave you some message. They had no chance to do it, but the girl acted as if she wanted to look her best when she was bumped off, so she opened her bag, took out her lipstick and started messing around with it. It was all very natural and no one noticed her when she surreptitiously scribbled this message. She was afraid you’d never find it in time to do any good, so she dropped her lipstick on the floor, feeling certain you’d see that. Then they prodded her with the gun, and told her it was time to go.”
“Sounds logical all right,” Mason said without enthusiasm.
“Gosh,” Drake told him, “I can’t understand why you’re so calm about it, Perry. Jeepers, let’s get to work on this thing. Let’s start figuring this message. Let’s— What do you think? Think we’d better get the police?”
“I think so.”
Drake looked at him and said, “You’re the damnedest guy I ever saw. At times you get all worked up over something and want me up out of bed at three o’clock in the morning, then you fool around and take something like this in your stride and don’t seem to be in any hurry about it. Those folks are in danger. Whether we find them alive or dead depends on how long it takes us to decipher that message and bring help to them.”