Room 418, and stood contemplating the door doubtfully. Momentary mystification in a room clerk’s face hardly justified forced entry into a private citizen’s hotel room.
He fingered a passkey, then flipped it into the air like a man tossing a coin. He caught the key and stooped to insert it into the keyhole.
Devereaux opened the door cautiously, closing it behind him, and then, as his eyes adjusted to the curtained gloom, the scene inside pulled together into a single, jolting effect. He looked hard, and again, as if expecting the scene to dissolve, while another scene, a more conventional one, appeared.
An elderly, gray-haired lady lay across a bed. Her eyes were fixed and unwinking, her lined features contorted. Dead, as if suddenly stricken. Devereaux’s rapid examination revealed no weapon, no visible injury. Around her was the disorder of a hundred incidentals to ordinary living suddenly pulled from their grooves and left in an uncatalogued heap.
The detective roamed through the small, boxlike room. There were clothes, a reddish-tinged-with-gray hair switch, greeting cards marking the memory hoard of scores of years and as many occasions, papers, swatches of cotton and silk, rhinestone-studded hatpins of a bygone day, a St. James Bible standing on the floor like a motionless grasshopper.
A beaded handbag held a net of $8.36. Devereaux retrieved an article from the floor and turned it absently in his hand. It was an enameled piece, like a polished sea shell, reading “San Francisco Exposition, 1914.” He picked the Bible off the floor and read the dedication page for a melancholy moment. An ink inscription, paled by time and set inside a flower design, read “To Cora Jennings, from Mother.”
Devereaux nodded mechanically to himself. Cora Jennings. Undoubtedly the lady of Jennifer Phillips’ reminiscence. He glanced toward the bed and his mouth pursed regretfully. A gray-haired lady, to be revered and buried sentimentally in the great family album. The scene before him was all wrong, with Cora Jennings atrociously miscast.
Devereaux went about the business of seeking out the less obvious evidences of assault and search. Corners, recesses, cubbyholes exposed nothing. Nothing of the assailant torn away in struggle, if there had been a struggle. No cuff link, button, strands of hair, bits of cloth, nothing. Fingerprints, if there were any, must wait on proper equipment.
Devereaux went to an only closet and peered inside. It was pitch dark, and crammed tightly with clothing and luggage. He was feeling about blindly for a light switch, when the lights happened like an Independence Day rocket bursting inside his head.
Devereaux raised his guard, too late, then grappled wildly with a charging mass of flesh, but too weakly. His hands were dying, and a sudden knee in his groin started a nausea that rose to join the pain in his head. He clawed the air, and fell with dresses and coats raining on his head.
He came to with a colony of dwarfs working tiny hammers in his head. Then, off the floor and out from under the pile of clothes, he found the sink and stuck his head under a running faucet. When the colony of dwarfs was reduced to just one, Devereaux studied himself in a hanging mirror. There was a lump on his head where a blunt instrument, a blackjack undoubtedly, had struck his skull, and his cheek near the left eye sported a mouse that was rapidly becoming a clear shade of blue.
As he quit the room, he was acutely alive to the lingering pain in his groin. He took the stairs down, reached the lobby, and then, without breaking stride, signaled the desk clerk to follow him.
Devereaux entered a room whose sign read “Office.” A moment later, the clerk joined him.
The clerk surveyed Devereaux uneasily, his eyes noting details of the detective’s battered appearance.
“I was slugged in Room 418,” Devereaux said. The desk clerk met the detective’s glare silently. “Got any ideas about who did it?”
The clerk shook his head.
Devereaux collared the clerk and pulled him close. “You’ve got sharp eyes and you don’t miss a bet. No one crosses that lobby without being cased.”
“I saw nobody,” the clerk said.
Devereaux pushed him away. “Empty your pockets. Turn them inside out.”
The clerk complied, then watched Devereaux finger through miscellaneous and commonplace items.
“Like I said, I’m not taking bets any more.”
“Strip,” Devereaux ordered.
The clerk looked at Devereaux protestingly. The detective’s blow caught him just under the jaw, close to the Adam’s apple. His hands were up defensively when the second blow bent him forward. Then, looking sick and green and tormented, the clerk began loosening his tie. Soon, nude except for a khaki money belt around his waist, he unbuttoned the belt sullenly and handed it to Devereaux.
Devereaux emptied its contents on a table. There were scores of small, square slips of paper—the day’s numbers play of chauffeurs, shine boys, doormen, workers, sundry bettors in the area.
“I said you were a smart boy,” Devereaux said.
The clerk stooped to recover his shorts and Devereaux kicked them out of his reach. “I asked you a question a while ago!” The detective disdained the mute appeal in the clerk’s eyes. “Who did you see running out of that lobby?”
The clerk shook his head, then held his ground stubbornly as the money belt whacked across his mouth. He pressed fingers to the flow of blood from his under-lip, with his eyes studying Devereaux as if detached from the pain he felt, as if speculating on the limits or extremes of the detective’s relentlessness. Finally he said sullenly, “Nick Longo.”
Devereaux looked at the clerk blankly. The name meant nothing to him. “Longo,” the clerk repeated. “He’s an old-timer.”
“New to me.” Devereaux frowned. His encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s underworld was a matter of pride with him. Very few had eluded his ken, and when it happened Devereaux took it as a personal failure. “Unless the name’s a phony,” he said. “What does he look like?”
“Medium height, dark. Face looks like it’s been through the mill.”
“Jail?”
“How should I know?”
“What’s his racket?”
The clerk shook his head. “I just happen to know the guy by name.”
Devereaux looked at the clerk shrewdly. “How much did he throw you to play dumb?”
The clerk reddened. “Twenty bucks.” He added hastily, “But just to forget I saw him.”
4.
On the street, Devereaux made his way to a candy store-luncheonette. The pay-station phone booth was unoccupied. He entered and dialed.
“Police Headquarters,” the voice announced.
Devereaux muffled his voice. “Check Room 418 at the Hotel Orleans.”
“Who’s calling?”
Devereaux kept silent,
