Locked Rooms (13 page)

But the deadly ambush laid for us Thursday as we walked in all innocence across the hotel lobby reduced the rest to little more than specks of dust on our way.

We’d had a pleasant breakfast—or Holmes had, while I drank coffee and ate a piece of toast while reading the newspapers. Holmes had the
Call,
I had the
Chronicle,
working my way from
NEW WOMAN IN POISON CASE
and past an advert for MJB coffee with two finger-prints accompanied by the statement “No two are alike—People differ in their coffee tastes as well as their thumb prints.” I consulted Holmes, and we agreed that the prints in the advert were those of fingers, not thumbs, so I went on to
GAY GATHERING ON YERBA BUENA FOR SWIM PARTY
and
RESCUED GIRL TELLS COURT BONDAGE STORY.

All in all, a satisfying day’s headlines.

We drained our cups, dropped our table napkins beside our plates, and made our way towards the lift.

The first volley of the ambush rang out across the dignified lobby, startling every inhabitant and sending Holmes and me into immediate defensive posture. The next shot fired hit home and froze me where I stood.

“Mary! It’s Mary Russell, I’d never be wrong about that, you’re the spitting image of your father. When I read you were in town I—”

I straightened: The previous night’s argument notwithstanding, I had no wish to inflict on Holmes a bullet aimed at me. I fixed him with one of those glances married people develop in lieu of verbal communication—in this case, the urgent glare and slight tip of the head that said (to give its current American colloquial), “Scram!”

Holmes faded away as no man over six feet tall ought to be able to do, leaving me alone to face my attacker.

The top of her hat might have tucked under my chin, had I been foolish enough to allow her that close. Its waving feathers and bristling bits of starched ribbon were ferociously up-to-date, her well-corseted figure was wrapped in an incongruously youthful dress whose designer would have been outraged at the sight (although it testified well to the tensile strength of the thread), and her hair might at one time have been nearly the intense black it now was. Her fingers sparkled with a miscellany of stones, and the mauve colour of her sealskin coat came from no animal known to Nature. She was making for me with both arms outstretched, and although she looked more likely to devour me than to embrace me, I did the English thing and resisted mightily the impulse to place the outstretched heel of one hand against her approaching forehead to keep her at arm’s length. Instead, I allowed her to seize my forearms and smack her painted lips in the general direction of my jaw.

It appeared that I had a dear friend in San Francisco.

“Mary, Mary, why on earth did you never write? My, you’ve become so grown-up, and so tall! Taller than your mother, even, and I thought she was a giraffe! Oh, dear, you poor thing, whisked away from your friends and your home like that—I said to Florence—you remember little Flo, your good friend?—that someone should just get on a train and go fetch you back. Imagine! Nothing but a child, and all alone in the world.”

“Er,” I managed.

“And you’ve kept your blonde hair, like your dear father—it never did darken like your mother said it would, now did it? Do you rinse it in lemon, like I told you to when you were twelve years old? It looks a nice thick head of hair, too, although this fashion for men’s haircuts is so unfortunate.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I pushed out into the storm of words. “I’m not sure I know who you are.”

The sound she emitted—laughter, I suppose—was a string of seven notes descending from a soprano’s high shriek to a low sort of chortle. The gaiety of it was somewhat undermined by the hurt expression in her eyes, but it was hard to know how I might have posed the question any less bluntly.

“I’m Auntie Dee, dear child. Your mother’s very best friend in all the world. She used to bring you over to my house so you could play dollies with my Flo. Although you usually ended up in a tree or down the street with her brother Frankie’s friends,” she added reluctantly, as if the memory was a somewhat shameful one.

I had to admit, in a tree with the boys sounded more like me than dollies with Flo. Although what my quiet, intelligent mother would have seen in this woman was beyond me.

Still, I did what was required of me. “Auntie Dee, of course, how ever are you, and dear Flo?”

During the course of the monologue that followed, I glimpsed Holmes coming out of the lift, dressed for the day. Give him credit, he did raise a questioning eyebrow in my direction. But there was little point in inflicting this female person on him, so I gave him an imperceptible shake of the head and lowered my eyes until I was gazing soulfully into my companion’s face. The motion, or perhaps the fact of her audience actually turning attention onto her, silenced her for a moment, a gap I took advantage of.

“Er, Auntie Dee, I haven’t had breakfast yet. Would you care to join me?” A lie, but casual interrogation of this woman might prove informative.

Again came the wince-making seven descending notes of laughter, and she reached out to slap my hand playfully. “How silly of me, of course you’re standing here starving to death, when all the while I came to your hotel to whisk you away to breakfast at your old Auntie Dee’s own table. If you’re free, that is, of course.” She looked vaguely around, showing that she had registered something of Holmes’ presence before he had faded into the palm trees. But before she could spot him, I took her hand in an imitation of childish glee.

“Of course I’d love to come. Shall we get a cab, or do you have a car?”

She looked at me askance, speech for once difficult to retrieve. But only for a moment. “Don’t you want to go and get your hat or something?” she asked.

I might have been proposing to walk into Union Square wrapped only in a bath-towel. However, I thought perhaps I wouldn’t take her to our rooms, even if Holmes had left.

“Oh, I’m only going to my old second home, aren’t I?” I asked. “No need for formality here, is there?”

Thus bereft of hat, coat, and gloves, I walked out of the hotel in my half-nude state towards the waiting car, only to pause at the sound of not-so-distant drums.

“What is that noise?”

“Oh, the Loyalty Parade down on Market Street,” she answered.

Now that I looked more carefully at the flow of traffic and pedestrians, it was obvious that some major disruption was going on a couple of streets down to my right.

“I hope we don’t have to get across it,” I said, climbing into the car, but fortunately she too lived in Pacific Heights, five streets up from the house I was slowly beginning to think of as mine. Aunt Dee’s, however—I could not call her otherwise for the moment, as she had yet to provide me with her full name—was higher up, far more ornate, and possessed a front garden no one would mistake for a jungle. The car rolled to a halt under the imposing Greek pillars of the portico and a man with a face like an ebony carving came out, surreptitiously tugging his white gloves into place. He held the door for my companion, allowing the driver to do the same for me.

“This is Miss Mary Russell,” she told her servant. “Tell Mrs La Tour that we require breakfast.”

“Yes, Mrs Greenfield,” the man murmured. I was grateful for the name, which rang not the faintest chime of familiarity. His, however, was another matter.

As Dee Greenfield turned to the door, she told me, “You won’t remember Jeeves, Mary; he’s only been with us for two years.”

Startled, I looked straight into the black eyes of the butler, seeing in their depths a well-concealed spark of humour.
“Jeeves?”

It was she who answered, over her shoulder. “Yes, his name was Robert, but we could hardly have that, could we, it was my husband’s name. So I let him choose another and that’s what he came up with. Silly, but what can one do?”

My involuntary grin fanned the spark of humour for an instant, then he turned to open the ornate wooden door for us. As I went past, I said, “Carry on, Mr Jeeves.”

The smooth dark skin around the man’s mouth twitched briefly, but nothing more.

The inside of the house was as needlessly ornate as the outside, although it reflected a very different era. The exterior decoration dated to the house’s period of construction some forty years earlier, but the original Victorian interior had been transformed, and recently by the looks of it, into a showcase of modern design. The Deco movement contributed its whirling patterns of rich colours on the walls, a tangle of wire and glass around every lighting fixture, long and languid chest-high marble figures of standing women and seated greyhounds in every corner—it was like taking up residence in a box of chocolate crèmes, chokingly rich.

As Mrs Greenfield unloaded her gloves, handbag, and the extraordinary mauve coat into the white-gloved hands of Mr Jeeves, she babbled without pause. “Isn’t this room just the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen? I shouldn’t say so myself, I know, but we just finished it last Christmas and it still gives me a little thrill whenever I walk into it. We had a dress ball to celebrate, and oh, you should have seen it with all the candles glowing and an eighteen-foot Christmas tree in the corner there! Every guest here oohed and aahed like they were children, it was so lovely. Oh, do run along, Jeeves, Miss Russell is utterly famished. Tell Mrs La Tour we’ll start with coffee in the conservatory.”

Although I was prepared for nearly anything in the realm of the spectacular, the conservatory had apparently resisted the efforts of Mrs Greenfield’s modern-minded decorator, and sat, Victorian and defiant, attached to the back of the house. It was a pleasant room, white-painted wood and basket chairs, although the plant life showed an unfortunate preference for orchids so ornate they appeared artificial.

The coffee arrived, blessedly strong and served in eggshell-thin bone china, a combination that soothed the spirit. Mrs Greenfield rambled on, regaling me with elaborate tales of people whose names she seemed to think I should know. I began to suspect that her mind might be none too firmly rooted in the here and now, that perhaps she imagined that I was my mother, but then I decided that no, it was more a matter of her self-absorption being so profound, she simply assumed that the rest of the world saw through her eyes.

A person like this is the easiest of all to interrogate, as they never look beyond the opportunity to talk about themselves to question why their audience might be asking along certain lines. It is mildly exhausting, to be sure, as it requires close attention to tumbling streams of nonsense in order to pluck out the occasional nugget being washed one’s way. And since it would hardly do for me to take notes, I had to hold in my mind all the glimmering bits, gold and pyrite alike.

If this woman knew my mother, then she would know when my family had lived in this city, and when they had not. It took many circuitous loops and back-tracks, and a number of the reference points she used would take some research on my part to pin down as to their date—for example, that we had arrived back in San Francisco, baby brother in tow, the very week that that exclusive French couturier on Post Street had opened.

The cook also very evidently dated from before the modernisation of the house. Mrs La Tour presented us with a breakfast that was solidly Edwardian in its sensibilities, and although I was not in the least hungry, I had begun by telling my “auntie” that I was on my way to breakfast, so I could scarcely claim to have eaten already. I pushed my eggs, grilled tomatoes, and various fried objects around on the plate until she noticed, and then forced down a quantity of the congealed food before she could pick up my fork and feed me. The meal left me feeling as if I ought to set off for a brisk march around the circumference of the city, and it was with gratitude that I pushed away from the table.

This time she led me into a morning room from which the sun had already retreated. But a fire had been laid and more coffee stood ready on the low table between two comfortable chairs. I was handed a cup without being asked if I wished it, and before I had done more than blow across the top of the cup, we were interrupted by a person whose presence went far to explain the vast and recent changes in the household.

A bustle in the hall-way and an exchange of words at the door warned of an impending invasion, and indeed, seconds later the door was flung open and in whirled a petite, black-haired, absolutely perfect specimen of the species
Flapper Americanus.
She was quite obviously just coming in from the night’s entertainments, although it was well past nine o’clock in the morning, and her clothing and makeup were very much the worse for wear. Both of her silk stockings were out at the knees—stockings that I knew from my earlier bout of shopping cost nearly five dollars—an English pound for a pair of stockings! The hem of her abbreviated skirt cried out for the attention of an expert seamstress, her collar was smudged with face-powder, and unless wearing a single earring was the fashion here, she’d lost one of her diamond pendants.

What I found most shocking, however, was the lack of reaction on the part of her mother, who merely shook an affectionate head at the bedraggled state of the newcomer.

“Mummy, darling,” the jazz-baby was exclaiming before she had cleared the door-way, “Jeeves says you have a guest—what on earth are you doing bringing a guest home at this hour, I thought that kind of goings-on was reserved for the younger generation? And even I only drag friends in for breakfast after we’ve been out all night, I don’t begin the day with abductions. Oh! I’ve been with Trudy for the past three hours, stuck on the other side of Market Street with that pig of a parade the children are putting on—twenty thousand boys, they say, God, what a nightmare thought, all of them banging away on instruments and marching and pulling floats, so that even if you weren’t drunk beforehand you’d need to be by the time you’d got past it
—and
she’s just given up smoking and I’m dying, just
dying
for a smoke, tell me you don’t mind, Mummy dearest, and if your friend objects I’ll just have to skulk away into the conservatory and puff away among the orchids.”