by one’s hands from the gallery floor, and of course that is what the intruder did. The only impression I got was of an unusually tall, lank, shabbily dressed male.
Tosche didn’t hesitate; he followed him, and I chased after the two of them, noticing as I passed through the room that one of my suitcases was lying open on the bed where I certainly hadn’t left it. When I reached the railing, the intruder, running with immensely long strides, was vanishing into a doorway. Tosche was ten feet behind him. I would have been a poor third, so I went to phone the desk.
A few seconds passed before anyone responded. I was still blinking because I hadn’t expected my flea market buy-and-sell expert to be such a peerless man of action. I explained the situation to the night clerk: There’d been an intruder in my room. He had exited by way of the balcony, and my friend had chased after him.
“They just ran out through the lobby,” the night clerk said. He hesitated. “Should I call the police?”
“I really do think they might appreciate it. This character seems to have a facility for getting into hotel rooms. If he does that often, he’ll give New Orleans a bad name.”
“Right,” the clerk said. I was just about to hang up when I heard, over the phone, the outside bell ring and the buzzer sound as the clerk responded. He announced, “Your friend just came back.”
“Alone?” I asked.
The clerk sounded surprised. “Yes. Alone.”
“Then he didn’t catch him. I’m sorry to hear that. Send him up.”
I turned to the open suitcase. As far as I could determine without touching anything, we had interrupted the intruder just as he was getting started, and nothing was missing.
Tosche arrived muttering angrily to himself. “There was a car waiting down the street for him.”
“Never mind,” I said. “You get an A plus for effort. You have super reflexes. Did you get a good look at him?”
“Good enough. I know the guy. He’s a street character—goes by the name of Little Boy. Maybe because he’s so tall and gawky. I also got the make of the car that picked him up, but they had the license number covered.”
I gave him my sincere congratulations. “Some people live out their entire lives without ever finding out what fate intended them for,” I said. “Thanks to this little adventure, that won’t happen to you. You’re a natural-born witness. All of this will interest the police exceedingly, and the more interested they are, the less they’re inclined to hurry. You’d better telephone the bar and let your friend know we’ll be late.”
A short time later the police arrived along with the manager. When they learned that Tosche had recognized the intruder, they suddenly had visions of solving a number of similar crimes at one swoop. They sent for a fingerprint expert and assigned one of their number to take a detailed statement from Tosche. Another officer huddled with the hotel’s manager and tried to figure out how the intruder had gotten into the hotel and then into my room.
As far as I was concerned, these were the wrong questions. I wanted to know how he knew which room was mine.
When a sergeant arrived, I gave him time to take in the situation, and then I briefed him on my earlier adventures. For confirmation, I referred him to his colleague, Lieutenant George Keig.
“Do you think this may be connected?” he asked.
“If you’ve ever doubted that the night has ears, this is your proof. The sheriff announced to anyone within hearing that I was staying at the Hotel Marie Theresa. Obviously someone did hear and got curious about me.”
“But you came directly back.”
I said patiently, “One keeps stumbling onto all kinds of unexpected modern conveniences in the hinterland, and one of them is the telephone. It would be stretching credulity—mine, anyway—to suggest that Little Boy’s breaking into my room at this particular moment was only a coincidence. One of those clannish Cajuns overheard the sheriff and informed someone by telephone that Charlie Tosche and a stranger, name of Pletcher, had been making inquiries about Old Jake and his companion, after which they went to Old Jake’s cabon and found his body. Pletcher was staying at the Marie Theresa Hotel. Almost any Pointe Neuve resident with an insistent curiosity could have picked up that information and passed it along. The only thing that puzzles me is why anyone would bother.”
The sergeant nodded at my opened suitcase. “What did he find out?”
“Nothing except my name on the ID tag. We must have interrupted him just as he was getting started. He didn’t even have time to mess up my wardrobe.”
“We know all about Little Boy,” the sergeant said. “His name is Griff Wylan. The ‘Griff’ probably is short for something, but no one knows what, not even Wylan. At least, he says he doesn’t. He had a long juvenile record, but he’s supposed to be going straight, now.”
Dick finished his statement, I made a brief one, and then we claimed urgent business and left the room to the fingerprint expert. The manager followed me down the hall, fervently promising to have the lock changed on my room at once.
I doubted that it would make any difference. Little Boy must have entered the room through the door—he wouldn’t have risked climbing onto the gallery from the well lighted courtyard—so he certainly owned an effective master key. Probably it would work just as easily on any replacement lock the management had. It was more important to find out how he knew which room was mine, but the police would be looking into that.
I bade the manager good evening, told him I probably would be out late—which certainly wasn’t unusual behavior for a New Orleans hotel guest—and left him.
Outside the hotel door, we found the street marked off by a blaze of light at either end of the dim block: In one direction, Royal Street; in the other, Bourbon Street. Scatterings of tourists were drifting past on their way from one to the other. Even at that distance, a blare of music reached us from Bourbon Street. New Orleans jazz can be good, indifferent, or thoroughly bad, but it is always loud.
We turned toward Royal Street, where the sidewalks were jammed with tourists casually shopping or avidly discussing restaurant menus. We struggled through the crowds for two blocks and then escaped into a side street.
L’Endroit, a bar and night club located between Bourbon and Royal Streets, was convenient for any kind of French Quarter rendezvous. Further, it was large, dimly lit—with dangling ceiling ornaments shaped like musical instruments that threw convenient shadows—and throbbing with exuberantly loud live music that made it difficult to hear one’s own conversation, let alone overhear someone else’s.
Dick introduced me to “John,” a heavy-set man with a large, good-humored face and a thick but neatly trimmed beard. He wore a beret, a vest with sparkling ornamentation on it, and, in one ear, a gold earring with a small diamond. One glance at him shattered any stereotype I might have been fostering concerning customs agents.
We took places on either side of him and ordered drinks. I thanked him for waiting and gave him my card. He glanced at it and murmured into my ear during one of the band’s less noisy passages, “Dick said you wanted to see a special agent.”
Dick was sipping his beer and watching the crowd. I leaned close to John’s ear—the one without the earring—and described my day’s adventures. The
