Winter at Death's Hotel (27 page)

“Have I?”

“I'll mend it when I have a bit of time. How those busybodies upstairs ever get any work done, I don't know.
Some
of us don't have time for ghosts.”

“Who are they the ghosts of—I mean, who were they? Do they say?”

“One, the male one, is supposed to be the architect of this place; they say he killed himself by jumping off the roof. For all I know, that's a true piece of history, but it could be just another tale for all of me. The woman ghost is a French lady's maid.”

“Heavens.”

“Well, there really was such a person, madame. I asked Miss Castle, who is old Mrs. Simmons's maid, and she's been here as long as Mrs. Simmons has, and she says that there truly was a French lady's maid who disappeared two years ago and has never been found. Miss Castle is too sensible to believe in ghosts, but she says there
was
something strange; the woman simply vanished, and her employers, who were French themselves, didn't change their plans but went back to France and that was that.”

“Surely she was looked for.”

“I suppose she was, although Miss Castle says the hotel was very stiff about telling things to the press.”

“Perhaps she ran off with somebody.”

“Well, madame…” Ethel hung a dress back up in the cupboard and lowered her voice. “According to Miss Castle, the lady's maid was, you should pardon the expression,
carrying
on
with the mon-syoor.”

“Oh—you mean her employer.”

“Well, she was the wife's maid, but it was with the husband she was…you know.”

Louisa did know, but she was thinking about something else. Only two years ago. That was not such a long time. And somebody had told her something else that had happened two years ago in the hotel. What was it? It flitted in and out of her head like an evening bat. It was no good. She couldn't get it. She realized Ethel had asked her a question. “I'm sorry, Ethel; I was wool-gathering.”

“Do you want me to hold off sending the clothes out, or are we leaving?”

“I don't know; I don't know. Just leave them as they are today. I'll…think about it.”

She was hobbling on one crutch now, able to maneuver pretty well. She now and then forgot and put her right foot down. It hurt, no question of that, but the pain didn't seem to last, and the swelling was partly gone. The foot and ankle were still rather lurid, although faded; her face was much better, in fact almost normal. Or at least not so bad as it had been. She said to Ethel, “I think I want a cane.”

“Oh, isn't it too soon, madame?”

“That remains to be seen. I shall also need a shoe, as I can't possibly get my own shoe on that foot, not to mention the bandage that Galt insists I wear.” She'd been wearing both of a pair of heavy black stockings on her right leg the last two days, with no shoe. “I can't go limping about on a stockinged foot forever.” She thought about the cost of buying shoes so as to have a right shoe in a size that would go over the foot and the bandage. Money thrown away, because the shoe would be useless once the foot was normal again, not to mention the left one, unworn. “I'm going downstairs, Ethel.”

“Yes, madame.”

She limped out on the single crutch, feeling like Tiny Tim without the cheerfulness. The elevator operator, now a familiar, nodded and didn't bother to call out the floors. She went at once to Reception and asked to speak to the housekeeper but was told that Mrs. Wayne was on three seeing to a conversion, whatever that was. Not a religious one, she supposed. Told that the woman would be down “shortly,” she said she would wait in the lobby.

Mrs. Simmons was not yet at her table, but Manion was already in his chair against the far wall. His eyes locked on to hers. To her surprise, he looked away.

Her foot hurt, but she went to him and she sat down in an armchair next to him. He said in a sour voice, “I got a going-over from a cop. Twice.” He looked away again, then back at her, his eyes miserable. “You told him about me getting the cop's draft report on the first murder for you.” He allowed anger to show.

“Was it Detective-Sergeant Dunne? I didn't know it would make a difference, I'm sorry.” She said, “Do you know anything about a lady's maid who disappeared two years ago? French.”

He pushed himself deeper into his chair as if to get away from her, frowning. “The Frenchwoman. That one? Yeah, I know something. Between keeping the cops quiet about her and trying to find out what happened to her, I was busier'n a dog with six legs and fleas.” He laughed too loud, too fast. Then, a silence.

She filled it with “What happened?”

“She disappeared. Like that, pouf. One day she was here, then she wasn't.” He was scowling, his voice almost bitter—still, she thought, because of Dunne. “Who told you about her?”

“There's talk among the servants. She's a ghost now, it seems.”

“Oh, the ghost. Yeah, yeah.” He waved the idea away with a gesture, gave a kind of shrug as if to get rid of whatever was tormenting him. “Well, to be a ghost she'd have to be dead, and I could never find that she was dead.”

“The police?”

“Oh, the wonderful ‘New Yawk' police! Yeah. But Carver wanted it kept quiet, so the cops backed off and took some cash and I did the work. And came up empty.”

“Carver paid them?”

“
I
paid them. I mean, I was the middleman.”

“Cleary and Grady?”

“Nah, this was Missing Persons, not Murder. What're you after this time?” He sounded hostile.

She hadn't really put it into words before. “The French maid would be another woman from the hotel. The first chronologically.”

“Oh, your hobby-horse.” He shook his head. “But the French maid wasn't murdered. It doesn't fit. Anyway, it isn't your business.”

“Why not!”

He leaned toward her, his frown ferocious, his voice punishing. “You know why? Do you know how many people die in this city every day? You know how many die and nobody cares? People die here in rented rooms and they don't find them for a week! People die in the gutters, they sweep the dirt right over them! We look the other way here. It's how we get by. Leave it!”

She leaned away from him. “Then shame on you.” She stood. Over his shoulder, she saw Mrs. Simmons making her way to her table. Part of her brain registered how well the old woman did with her canes, what care she took to place them, the way she lifted her heavy body on them. She murmured, “I have to go. I'm sorry if I got you into trouble with Detective-Sergeant Dunne.” Then she said, remembering something that Dunne had told her, “Are you married, Mr. Manion?”

Manion looked at her with angry, defeated eyes. “What if I am?” He shrugged. He said, “If you get anymore notions about that Frenchwoman, leave me out of it.”

She limped across the lobby to Mrs. Simmons. “Might I sit down for a moment?”

“Oh, hon, do that! I'm dying for company. If that Carver would let me have Fannie down here I'd be all right, but I just hate being alone. You look better, but I'd use a little powder if I was you, not that you want to look made up. How's that ankle? One crutch is better than two, I guess!”

“I wanted to ask you about canes.”

“Oh, I hate 'em.”

“It would be like matriculating if I could move up to a cane, Mrs. Simmons.”

“Oh, well, you, yes. You're young and it's only an ankle. With me it's hips, both of 'em, they hurt like knives are being stuck into me, and it's either the canes or crawling. I look like a wounded duck with them, I know I do, but I dare say you'd look pretty smart.”

“I thought it might cheer me up if I got myself a nice cane.”

“There's no such thing as a nice cane, dearie. It's like saying ‘nice artificial leg.'”

“How about ‘walking-stick,' then? Men's walking-sticks are quite handsome.”

“Yes, but try hoisting yourself around on one! You need a handle to lean on. But if you want walking sticks, ask my nephew. He knows where every smart thing in New York is sold. He's kind of a Beau Brummel, if you take my meaning—very big on piling on the lugs.”

But Louisa was off somewhere else—back, in fact, in her conversation with Manion. “Do you remember a French maid who disappeared two years ago, Mrs. Simmons?”

“Oh, that was terrible!” She leaned close, dropped her voice. “There was scandal.” She straightened. “They shouldn't allow foreigners into a hotel of this quality. Not French foreigners, I mean; of course, English people are just like us, but the French, well, really.”

“A young woman disappeared.”

“She surely did. She couldn't have disappeared more completely if she'd been a soap bubble somebody had stuck a red-hot needle into.”

“They say her ghost haunts the hotel.”

“Who does? What an idea! Ghost, indeed—I've said it before, ghosts don't haunt, they
inhabit
. And the last place she'd want to inhabit is this hotel, I can tell you, from the way she carried on. Her and her so-called employer. While his wife was doing the stores. It was a scandal.” She leaned forward again, lowered her voice, and tapped the table for emphasis. “If you ask me, if she
inhabits
anything, it's some sporting house in one of the bad parts of town, because that's where she belonged!” She sat back. “I take the wife's side.”

Louisa hadn't paid much attention to this. She'd been thinking.
The
copper-haired woman comes here for an assignation and is murdered. The French maid has an affair with her employer and disappears.
She said very slowly, because she remembered now what it was she had been told, “Mrs. Simmons…You told me…that Fannie…barked at something in your rooms a year or two ago.”

“Oh, she did. It was terrible. I love her dearly, but I thought the first time she did it, if that dog don't shut up, I'll give her a licking. That's what I thought, poor dear little thing. Now I'm used to it.
Like
it.”

“So it was when you first had her?”

“Yes, I hadn't had her, oh, long enough to know when she had to do her business, you know, and what toys she liked, but not
too
long. I suppose it was a couple of months.”

“When was that?”

“Well—Fannie just had her third birthday three weeks ago; I know that because we had a party for her. I didn't have any other dogs; she hates other dogs; but I had some people. I'd have had
you
if you'd been here, but you hadn't got here yet. It was really nice, even with Fannie barking at everybody.”

Louisa felt let down. “So her barking came before the French maid disappeared.”

“Oh, she was always barking. Oh, but you mean at my fireplace. Well, no. After, really. You see, Fannie was a year old and a bit when I got her, because she'd belonged to my youngest daughter, who's married to a fairly nice lawyer in New Jersey, but they couldn't stand the noise, so I took her. It was a love match. Sweet little thing.”

Mrs. Simmons went on with the details of the birthday party. Louisa smiled and nodded but was thinking about what it meant that the dog had barked at the wall after the French maid had disappeared.

Then the hotel housekeeper showed up.

***

As she had expected, the hotel had a Valley of Lost Things, actually a boxroom far in the back. Louisa found a pair of shoes with a label, “#244 1887 Hochausen.” The shoes—boots, really—were indeed years out of style but just what she wanted, coming well above her ankle and tied with laces so she could pull the right one tight for support. “I'll take this one, if I may, and of course I'll return it.”

“You needn't return it, ma'am, it's been so long. And take both.”

“I need only the one, thank you so much.” It was a hideous thing, but it was several sizes too big for her normal foot, and so she could wear it over the swelling and the bandage. And walk! After a fashion.

Coming out of what the housekeeper had called the “left-behind room,” Louisa almost ran into a hurrying man who turned out to be Alexander Newcome. He was dressed to go out in a very tight overcoat and a rather narrow hat with brims so tightly curled they looked like tubes. He stopped, apologized, doffed the hat, and stood there in what she had heard Arthur call “an agony of embarrassment.”

“I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself, Mrs. Doyle. I disappointed you.”

“Of a carriage ride? Hardly a major tragedy, Mr. Newcome.”

“How can I make it up to you? Please.”

His pain was so evident that she smiled. Was he so refined that social pain was the only sort he felt? She said, “You could take me somewhere to buy a walking-stick like yours, if you like.” Today's stick was quite handsome, ebony with a handle that went out at right angles and would give the support that Mrs. Simmons had said was needed.

“I know just the place—quite antique and I think a bit fusty, but they have the best sticks in New York.”

“That would be lovely.”

He insisted that he take her to lunch, as well—tomorrow? And a ride in Central Park? And he would show her a remarkable block of French flats called the Dakota. And the millionaires' castles on Fifth Avenue. And—

“Enough, enough! We'd need a week, not an afternoon, and I must be back to dress to go out.” She would be meeting Minnie to go to the Wild West. And of course she
would
meet Minnie, so of course she wasn't packing up to go and meet Arthur. What had she been thinking of?

Of course.

When had she made that decision? Perhaps when she was talking with Mrs. Simmons. The French maid, the dog. Manion's saying,
It
isn't your business.
Meaning that it wasn't his, either, because she saw that Dunne had unmanned him somehow. What had he said?
Leave
me
out
of
it.
She felt a niggling disappointment. And he was married.