Winter at Death's Hotel (41 page)

“I wonder which Carver it was who took them.”

“The old man. I asked.” Dunne looked at the hard-faced old woman. “Tougher than tripe, that woman.”

He pressed a blunt fingertip against the glass of a photograph. She put her eye closer and saw, just above the fingertip, a star-shaped, gray something. He said, “I didn't get it the first time I saw it. Not until you mentioned the architect taking a jump.”

She looked again, then put her head back to look at the whole photo. It took her seconds to make everything out—a view looking straight down, an avenue to the left, a jumble directly below with shapes she saw resolve themselves into wagons and horses seen from above, trees, clutter. And the star shape in the middle. “It's the hotel. And that's a
man.
”

“The architect, maybe. How many jumpers have they had?” He tapped the glass again. In the lower right corner of the photograph it said “Carver New York.”

“Ghoulish,” she said.

“Ghoulish to take it and then ghoulish to put it on the wall. Have you ever seen the old man?”

“Nobody has in years, they say. He lives upstairs with a male nurse. I suppose the doctor sees him. And his son.”

Dunne tipped his head back and looked along his nose at the photograph. He said, “Maybe this place
is
cursed.” He put a knuckle between his teeth and chewed on it, then said suddenly, “Tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“What
exactly
do you believe's going on in this hotel?”

“Something that frightens me.”

He leaned against the desk. “What?”

“I don't know!” She sounded to herself like the archetypal hysterical woman—that is, like a man's idea of a hysterical woman. She added, “That
he's
in the hotel—what else do you think?”

“The Butcher?” He frowned at that, looked at Cassidy, who was frowning, too. Dunne said, “Anything else you haven't told me?”

“Mrs. Simmons's dog.” She told him about the dog and the barking. He asked if she believed it was a ghost and she said she thought that was nonsense. “But it
was
just after the French maid disappeared.”

He digested that. “Was there any smell?”

“Mrs. Simmons didn't say. But old people don't notice smells.”

“A corpse would smell.”

“I didn't say it was a corpse!”

“But it must be what you suspect—why else would you put the dog and the disappearance together?”

“I don't know, I don't know! It's this damned place!”

He made a humming sound, then took a turn to the window and back. “Mrs. Simmons is Newcome's aunt.” He made it sound like
ant
. “If it wasn't for his death, I'd march in and ask her about the dog. But you know, I'd never get a search warrant on anything that flimsy—we'd have to start taking the wall down, and there'd be a load of resistance from the hotel.”

“The walls are brick behind the wood paneling.”

“See? They'd never let me do it.” He sat and pulled his chair a few inches closer. “Look, Mrs. Doyle, I respect your feelings. You're a smart woman and you know what's what. But do you have anything—
anything—
that would kind of…
focus
your fears about the place? Anything?”

She shook her head. “I think about it. I even dream about it. But it's all…” She shook her head again. “I'm a foolish woman.”

“No, that you're not. But you're a puzzle, because you're connected to so many of the deaths. Connected by pretty thin threads, I admit—you saw somebody, you knew somebody, you went for a ride in the park with somebody—but you're connected.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I wish I knew.”

“You could look at the men in this cursed hotel, then, if you've nothing better to do! Look in the register for starters, see who was staying here when the French maid disappeared and when Mrs. Harding was murdered.”

“Mrs. Doyle, time—”

“And look at all the male employees! How many men does this place employ? How many of them were here two years ago? And how many when ‘Shakespeare' was murdered five—”

“Mrs. Doyle!”

She bent forward and hugged herself. “Maybe I'm cursed, not the hotel.”

He shook his head at that. They both waited for something more to be said. When the silence had built for too long, he said, “The idea that the Butcher is here is a pretty far reach.” Then he said he was done and she could leave. She got up and put her weight on her cane. She had been looking at the filing cabinet off and on and she was fairly sure that the third drawer said “History—Plans, Construction.”

Put there by old Carver?

“Coming, Mrs. Doyle?”

Sergeant Cassidy was holding the door for her. Dunne had already disappeared. She said, “Oh—sorry.” She moved to go around him, but he stepped out into the corridor and stood with his right hand holding the door open for her, his back to the door. She put her left hand on the edge of it to steady herself and felt the side of her hand strike projecting metal. She felt down, found the shape of a big, old-fashioned key. She said to Cassidy, “Should we lock up?”

“Yes, ma'am. Just waiting for you.” He showed her his key from Reception.

She didn't stop to think. She slid the inside key out of its socket and closed it into her hand. It was so big that the part that went into the lock stuck out between her thumb and her palm. She turned her fist and hid it in the folds of her skirt. “Thank you so much. I'm so slow with this cane…”

“No trouble at all, ma'am. Take your time.” He was locking the door. She was limping up the corridor, wondering what she would do with the key. And wondering what doors it might open.

***

Dunne was just coming out of a booth where he'd written a telegram when Cassidy came into the lobby. Dunne handed the telegraph form in at Reception and showed his police card and said to the panjandrum, “That's confidential police business. If you peach, I'll have you in the Tombs.”

The eminence behind the desk looked shocked. He said something about treating every message as confidential. Dunne went away grinning, muttered “Oh, yeah” to Cassidy. When they were out on Twenty-Third Street, he said, “I wired Pittsburgh to find out what they've got on the Carvers out there. The old man took some of those pictures there.” He eyed the Irish doorman, who turned away. “Did you see the old man when you were asking questions last night?”

“Saw him, yeah—asleep. That's all he does, is sleep.”

“Doctor with him?”

“No, some flunky. A nurse. A guy.”

“What's the old man look like?”

“White hair. Something wrong with his face—real red, a lot of bumps and things.”

Dunne pushed his fists into his huge overcoat. “There's something fishy with the Carvers.”

“The nurse guy says you can talk to the old man sometimes, but he won't get it. He's off his nut.”

“That's what I'm maybe afraid of.” Dunne stared at the passers-by as if they were suspects. “I want you and Forcella to go over all the hotel staff's statements we took yesterday about Newcome. I want to know how many men work for this hotel. Then I want to know how many of them have worked here for at least two years. If you can't get that from the statements, come back up here and get the information from that manager.”

“You really think there's something not kosher with the hotel?”

Dunne scowled at the street. “I don't think Miz Doyle is loony, if that's what you mean.”

***

Louisa knew, of course, exactly what she was going to do with the key she'd stolen. She ate a small part of the table d'hote luncheon and instead of going back to her room went down the corridor that ran toward the back of the hotel from Reception. Anybody who saw her would think, if they thought at all, that she was going to the ladies' convenience back there. (
Say
toilet
, Minnie had said.
Oh, Minnie…
) She went on past the convenience, however, and put the key into the lock of old Mr. Carver's office—it was her notion that if you did things confidently, nobody would ask questions—and slipped inside.

She went around the desk and leaned her walking-stick on it and sat on the edge of the chair that Dunne had used. She bent forward and read the labels on the filing drawers again. Yes, the third one said “History—Plans, Construction.” She believed in history. It seemed to her to explain many aspects of life. Although not enough of them. Might it explain the New Britannic—and her fear?

The drawer was too full and opened grudgingly. Some of the papers were sticking up and caught on the top of the opening; all of them had been crammed and squeezed in so that she had to struggle to take any out.

There had once been order, she thought: gray card separators stood between inches-thick bundles of paper. She took out the entire first lot, releasing a smell of dust.

“History” meant mostly newspaper articles, along with an early version of the hotel brochure and some letters of congratulation on the hotel's opening. Many of the newspaper things were puff pieces—“New Hotel to be Most Modern in This City,” and so on—but some were more like straightforward reporting on the building's progress. “Cornerstone Laid for New Hotel”; “Twenty-Third Street to be Beautified by Hotel Construction”; “Center of Fashionable Caravanserais Moves Uptown to Twenty-third.” She supposed that the impetus for most of them had come from the Carvers—young Carver, then only in his twenties, was quoted in a lot of them.

Some, nonetheless, had substance. Several focused on the unique construction: double-brick walls filled with “crushed Italian volcanic stone.” That expression was used again and again; she guessed it had come from the Carvers, too. There was even a piece about the stone, “Italian Isle of Stromboli's Volcano Erupts in New York,” which seemed to find newsworthy the purchase of seventy tons of “porous, pumice-like Italian rock from a romantic Italian island.” The rock had come by steamship to a Brooklyn dock, then had been carried in “a parade of more than a hundred wagons” to a crusher in the east Forties.

She moved to the second block of papers, the building plans. These were mostly no more help to her than hieroglyphics would have been. Most were highly detailed, therefore impossible for her to relate to the hotel as a whole. There were large drawings of a fireplace mantel to go into the bar (unseen by her, as she didn't go into the bar), of the lion-head bosses that were to decorate the front doors (still very much there), of the brass panels on the inside of the lifts (still on display). Many plans showed construction details she couldn't figure out—mortices, stone joints, brickwork patterns. She had had no idea that putting up a building required so much—even, in one case, specifications for the size nail and the kind of nail-head to be used.

Her eyes smarted after an hour of it, and her head was beginning to ache. Still, she didn't put on a light, afraid that it might call attention. She folded the papers and put them back into the pile with a sigh. Only toward the back of the drawer did she finally unfold plans that showed the entire hotel, one of them a “typical floor plan” that at last gave her a grasp of how the rooms related to the famous rubble-filled brick walls.

It's like a giant centipede
. What she meant was that the double-brick walls formed a kind of many-legged shape, the body a rectangle that ran around the outside of the principal corridors, the legs projections that ran from those corridors to the outer walls. These double walls were labeled “sound-barrier walls” and in several places had instructions connected to them by beautifully curved arrows with delicate heads, such as “28-inch outer dimension” and “stone fill between.”

But it was untrue that all the internal walls had these sound barriers. In fact, none of the walls within the centipede's body had them; in there, much of the space was taken up by two air shafts, much of the rest by the lifts and stairways and small rooms and cupboards labeled “janitorial” and “housekeeping.” The fact was, she saw, that if you stayed in one of the New Britannic's few inner rooms, your view was of an air shaft, and your room was far from soundproof.

Outside the centipede's body, however, it was another story. The sound-barrier walls (the legs) ran between all adjoining suites and between most adjoining single rooms, although where single rooms opened on a short corridor that paralleled the centipede's legs, there was no double-brick wall. Sound barriers, the floor plan implied, were for those who could afford them.

The wintry light beyond the window told her it was mid-afternoon; she would have to finish soon. She turned back to something that had snagged her attention; she couldn't find it, then did, had to put her nose almost against the dust-smelling paper to read it: “Deluxe closet.”

Closet
means
cupboard
. She knew that because it was in a glossary of American terms in her guidebook. But what would a deluxe cupboard be? She followed the curving line down to the little arrow at its end; it pointed at—she had to go to the legend in a lower corner to find what the symbols meant—a fireplace. A gap of about eighteen inches seemed to have been left next to the fireplace for the deluxe cupboard. What would be deluxe about a cupboard only eighteen inches wide?

She pictured the sitting room in the suite she had had. There had been a fireplace. Next to it had been paneling. Were the panels eighteen inches wide? Only a foot and a half? Had their suite not been deluxe enough to have a cupboard?

Like one scene replacing another in a harlequinade, the mental picture of her former suite became one of Mrs. Simmons's. It was exactly the same, except that there was a dog barking at the place where the deluxe cupboard should have been.