Winter at Death's Hotel (45 page)

“Oh, it's quite nice.”

Marie went around, unbuttoning the back of her dress and turning lights on and off. When she was down to one again, she said, “One light? With the green scarf?” She picked up something from the oak table as if she meant to start cleaning, then dropped it. “The housekeeper insists that they will have the room cleaned by half-ten. I sincerely hope so! I shall be out until then or a few minutes later, and the summoning is at eleven!”

Louisa was standing next to the fireplace. Now that the table had been moved, the wall there was accessible. “Is this where you heard the noises?” She began to feel over the panel for a crack that would reveal a door. It had occurred to her that when she called the police, her story would be more believable if she could actually lead them to an entrance into the tunnels or passages or whatever they were. If they existed.

Marie had gone into the bedroom, now put her head out the door but kept the rest of herself, except for one bare shoulder, out of sight. “That's where I felt Azul's strength. As if he were
pushing
to make himself visible. It must be the devil's own fight, you know, breaking through the barrier from infinity into reality.”

Louisa felt all over that part of the wall but found nothing. It was paneled, like the same section on the other side of the fireplace and like the rest of the sitting room. The paneling was carved in rectangles made of simple bevels with a raised molding around them. It was possible, she supposed, that the molding hid the edges of an opening, but she couldn't get her fingernails under it to find out. Nothing felt loose; nothing gave when she pushed.

Marie came back wearing a silk kimono and smoking a cigarette. Louisa said, “You felt you were being watched, you said.”

“I
knew
I was being watched,
chère
.” She pointed up into a corner of the room. “Up there—I could feel rays of divinity coming from up there. Want a cigarette?”

“Oh, no, thanks. Yes! Yes, I will. For my nerves.” She went to the corner and looked up. A dentillated wood cornice ran all the way around the room. It all looked as solid as the trees it had come from. Still, she thought she might see something if she could get up there and really look.

Marie handed her a lighted cigarette. “What are you looking at, my dear?”

“If I could stand on a chair, I might have a better look up there.”

“Stand on a chair—are you mad? You just broke your ankle! Come over here and sit down. Please, my dear. Stand on a chair, indeed!”

But Louisa wasn't listening. She was looking at Marie's room key, which she had tossed down on a table next to the chair in which she'd now seated Louisa. Marie went off to the bedroom again; Louisa puffed once on her cigarette, held it in her mouth, and whipped from her pocket the key that had opened Carver's office. She put it over Marie's key. They were identical in size, but the key from Carver's office had extra cuts and indentations in it.

Wasn't there something called a skeleton key?

It took her thirty seconds to find out.

There was.

“Not going, I hope, my dear.” Marie was back in the sitting room. “I need you to help me get into a corset. Do you mind?”

Of course she didn't mind, but it occurred to her that it was time that Marie got herself a lady's maid. When she suggested it—Marie was displaying a formidable pair of breasts, holding up some flimsy French garment that would soon cover them—Marie said, “In Paris, my companion dresses me. We are companions of many years.” Her eyes met Louisa's; Marie smiled, hesitated, said, “
Eh, bien
,” and turned away. “The corset, if you please.”

***

In her own room again, Louisa thought about the skeleton key and Marie's wall. Marie was going to be out until almost eleven, she said, but of course she'd be later than that because she was always late. There would be time to go into her room and look at that wall again.

Louisa had convinced herself that she would have to have proof that passages ran through the walls of the hotel. Suppose, for example, the men who had seen old Carver attack her last night had all left the hotel, taken trains? Hadn't Ethel said they were mostly traveling men in the annex? Suppose young Carver had threatened Galt with something terrible unless he denied that any of it had happened? Suppose Louisa were to have no proof but what she could supply herself? She would most certainly call Detective-Sergeant Dunne at noon (or sooner), but Dunne would want facts. She didn't want him saying that she was again too much at the center of things.

A knock sounded on her door. She felt a stab of fear, conquered it. “Yes—who is it?”

“It's Galt, Mrs. Doyle.”

She hesitated. At that moment, she didn't trust anyone—not any man, at any rate. And Ethel had given him his walking papers; might he be resentful? She said, “What is it, Mr. Galt?”

His voice was a little muffled by the door. “I only wanted to say how sorry…how ashamed I am about last night.”

She made sure the gun was in her pocket and kept her hand on it as she opened the door. He moved back half a step and said, “I won't come in. I just feel that what happened was terrible for you.”

“Mr. Galt, will you tell that to the police if I call them?”

“Indeed I will! Though it was my fault, him getting out.”

She opened the door wider. “I'm sure it wasn't. You can't be everywhere, and you have to have your sleep.” She lowered her voice. “And I think old Mr. Carver knows ways to get about the hotel that you don't.”

He stared at her rather stupidly. She said, “He's been spying on at least one guest that I know of—Miss Corelli. I'm going to look in Miss Corelli's rooms to see how he does it.”

“I don't think he can be doing anything like that. It's just that last night, he got away from me.”

He was looking doubtful, maybe frightened. She said, “I've told Mr. Carver—the young one—I'd give him until noon before I call the police about last night. I mean to tell them everything.”

He backed away another half-step and held up a hand. “I was hoping you might, well… You know Miss Grimstead's been walking out with me. I thought…as her and I had an unfortunate misunderstanding…you might, maybe, put in a word for me.” He got almost agitated and waved a hand as if shushing her. “Nothing personal! Nothing I mean that she'd see as interfering, but only…” He looked helpless. “I'm not such a bad fellow, Mrs. Doyle.”

The triviality, the banality of it, made her impatient with him. She muttered, “Of course. I'll see what I can do. Thank you for coming by, Mr. Galt.” She closed the door.

She thought frankly that he had a lot of cheek—as if she would interfere in something going on between her maid and a man. But that was unimportant; what was important was getting facts before noon.

She made sure that she had the skeleton key, and she took the hotel's letter opener from the desk in case she found something she wanted to pry open. She would have forgotten the revolver, but it was already in her pocket, and she felt the weight of it as she went out. It seemed now ridiculous to her that she was carrying a gun, an actual gun. Marion McCousins had made it quite clear that she was all but useless in trying to shoot it. Still, it would be silly to own it and not carry it. The gun stayed in her pocket next to her bustle.

It was twenty minutes before eleven. In a little more than an hour, she would see to it that justice was done to old Carver.

***

She had crossed the lobby and got into the lift when she saw movement out among the leather chairs. It was Manion. He was getting out of his chair, looking at her, hesitating. Abruptly, he sat down again. The lift doors closed.

“
Third
floor watcher step
please.
”

She pushed herself forward on her stick, stepped out of the car on Marie's floor.

“
Going
down
please.
”

The gates clashed. She limped to her right. The corridor was much finer than the one in the annex; here were good carpets, little lights in bronze sconces, vaguely good paintings and a statue or two. At the corner where she turned to get to Marie's room was a curtained alcove with two armchairs and a table in it, a little stage set that she supposed nobody used.

She limped to Marie's door. Her heart was beating too fast. She could feel weakness in her knees, like the weakness there of sex, like the weakness of the phthisis. And fear, now never far away.

She knocked, in case the maids were still cleaning. She put the skeleton key in the lock and it turned and the door fell open a few inches.

The room felt unsafe at first. There was no reason it should seem so except that the curtains were drawn and it was in semi-darkness. Marie's mess had disappeared from the heavy table. The odor of her cigarettes and her scent were still in the air. The odors of furniture polish and soap now lay over them.

Get
it
over
with, Louisa
.
Do
it
and
get
out
and
call
the
police. And damn being frightened. And damn this place.

She opened the drapes; cold, silvery light poured in. That was better. She put on two of the electric lamps; the light got warmer, safer.

She felt around the molding by the fireplace again and tried to slip the point of the letter opener under it, but it wouldn't go. If the molding hid a door, it did so expertly, the work of a skilled craftsman.

She looked up into the corner where “Azul” had first made his noises. A peephole up there? Perhaps hidden in one of the dentillations? She lifted one of the lamps to get more light, but she could still see nothing. She looked around for something to climb on and rejected the rather feminine gilt chairs because she was short and so were they. Even standing on one, she wouldn't have had her eyes level with the cornice.

Beyond the bedroom door was a slant-top desk with drawers below, rather narrow and quite delicate-looking. Still, when she rocked it, it felt sturdy. Could she move it? She could try.

After two pushes that moved it only a few inches over the carpet, she took out the drawers, lightening it. Then she pulled two prayer rugs out of the path and rolled the carpet—imitation Shiraz, but good—back and knelt so that she could lift the desk half an inch with one hand while she pulled the carpet from under the caster with the other. Another lift, another tug, and the left-hand casters were on bare wood floor. It was easy then to free the others and roll it across the room and position it in the corner, then little more effort to carry one of the gold chairs to set it with its back to the desk so that she had a kind of stair—chair seat, desk surface, top. But, easy as it might have been, she was breathing hard and, of all things, perspiring.
Ladies
do
not
perspire. The teachers' college…

She debated taking the letter opener. Falling off the desk with it in her hand would be dangerous. Better to lay it on the top where she could get it if she needed it, although the idea of bending while standing up there, her front flat against the wall, was dizzying.

She placed the letter opener, then leaned her cane in the corner of the room.

She lifted her skirts and raised her right foot to the chair seat. The next movement, she knew, was going to hurt: she would have to put her weight on her bad ankle. She turned and tried to transfer some of the weight to her hands on the chairback; pain still shot through the ankle as she raised herself.

Dear heaven, it seemed a long way up! She could lean a knee against the chairback and put her left foot on the desk's surface, then lean still farther forward and grasp the extended edges of the top to pull herself up. But then the wall rose above her to the cornice like a cliff. She could look up into the dentillations but see no more than she had from the floor. The cornice was still two feet above her. The only thing for it was to step up to the top of the desk. Without anything to hold on to or take her weight.

She balanced with her fingertips on the top and then raised herself on her left foot. When she had to let go, she felt a momentary swaying backward, then got her hands flat against the papered wall and clung there as if she had suction-cup fingers. Her heart was beating like a warning. But she had to go on, because her weight was on her bent left leg and the leg was starting to shake.

Up she went, feeling her left thigh muscles try to lock and refuse to go on; on she went until her left leg was straight and she could slide her right foot and stand there very straight, like a child learning posture, with her hands spread against the wall. Thinking,
How
will
I
ever
get
down?

The cornice was inches from her face. She tilted her head back without changing her balance, then slid her hands up the wall until they touched the dentillations and she could slowly, painfully, take a dentillation between each thumb and forefinger and so give herself the illusion of holding on.

At first she saw nothing. Then she saw, just above the complex molding that formed the bottom of the cornice, a line. And then, she saw that the line, itself only a few inches long, finished at each end in a vertical line that ran up to the junction where a dentillation poked forward from the background.

A
little
flap. Or a tiny door.

Now that she had found it, she was sorry. Now she would have to go on.

She crawled her right hand to the left like a five-fingered spider, trying to hold a dentillation with the other hand as she did so, failing, pressing herself tight against the wall. The fingers reached the lines. She got her index and third fingers beyond the dentillation and pushed.